UNH’s Local Harvest dinner brings farmers and students together at the table

It’s almost undeniable that local food is good food. Unfortunately, that fact has been lost on most people over recent decades as processed food and well-preserved produce has become the norm.
The University of New Hampshire’s Office of Sustainability Programs hopes to take part in changing that. Already supplying schools across the state with locally-grown apples, the Office of Sustainability turned over one of the university dining halls to local farmers last week, treating students to some atypical fare and giving them a crash course in what local food has to offer.

Beef and lamb, raised a few miles away in Barrington, were served alongside tomatoes and squash grown right on campus and mussels from the Isles of Shoals. Even the soda was local—Squamscott Beverages of Newfields supplied hundreds of bottles of lemon-lime, black cherry and other sodas. 
Reactions varied. Some embraced the change. At one table, bottles of Squamscot soda were piled high and a student was calling friends to tell them about the food.

“Dude, they’ve got like, legit steaks here,” he said.

Meanwhile, a pair of girls passed by the mini-cheesecakes made with goat cheese. “What’s with all the weird food?” one asked.

Henry Ahern of Bonnie Brae Farm in Plymouth provided the venison served at the dinner. Ahern serves as a member of the Farm to Restaurant Connection committee of New Hampshire Made, Inc., a non-profit organization that works to increase sales of products made in the state. He’s been raising red deer at Bonnie Brae since 1994, and says the United States imports about 3,000 pounds of venison each year from New Zealand, even though it’s often available locally. This is because of a lack of awareness of local agriculture, according to Ahern. 

The benefits of locally grown food go beyond those of freshness and quality, Ahern says.

“If you support local agriculture, you support open space and all the views people like to see,” he says. Local farmers keep the fields open, the landscape green and the tourists coming back.

Elisabeth Farrell is the Food and Society program coordinator for the university’s Office of Sustainability Programs. She was the principal organizer behind the Harvest Dinner, which she put together to educate people about the food and agricultural heritage of New Hampshire. Using local food cuts down on transportation costs, auto emissions and the trash generated by packaging, she says.

“On a basic … person-to-person level, it strengthens community,” she says.

Wendy Barry, co-owner of Lasting Legacy Farm in Barrington, supplied the beef, chicken, turkey, lamb and pork served at the dinner. Consumers have long been relying on cheap, mass-produced food, sacrificing quality for the bottom line, according to Barry. That’s changing, she says, as people are tired of “chemicals and everything else” in their food.

“People are making better choices for themselves,” says Barry. The university’s Organic Garden Club grew most of the vegetables used in the meal. The club operates a weekly farm stand on campus. Mac Griffin, a member of the club, thinks that as more students are aware of the benefits of local, organically grown food, they could encourage the university to serve more local products in the dining halls.

“Students are such a big population and they hold such sway with dining services,” he says.
Office of Sustainability director Tom Kelly sees the dinner as a step toward “relocalizing” the state’s food system, wherein “hospitals, schools, universities, (and) grocery stores” could all use locally grown food rather than importing it from other states. Re-establishing that system will take time, though. Until then, Kelly says programs like the Office of Sustainability’s Farm to School program, in which 250 New Hampshire schools are supplied with locally produced apples and apple cider, will help “build back up local sustainability.”

“All this stuff has been lost over time, so we need to rebuild it,” he says. “These are baby steps along the way.”