http://grist.org/food/with-real-food-calculator-students-take-prop-37-into-their-own-hands/

http://www.realfoodchallenge.org/calculator

The Real Food Calculator is a tool developed by the Real food Challenge that allows college students to evaluate the food purchased by their universities or colleges. The tool calculates how “real” the food is using a holistic scale which includes how sustainability it was produced, how fair the labor conditions it was produced under are,   and how it had to travel to reach the university. Students who use the calculator audit their school cafeteria and other eating establishment and then use the information they gather to make recommendations about how to make food purchasing more sustainable and “real.” The goal is to get universities to eventually sign onto a Real Food Campus commitment whereby they pledge to purchases at least 20% “real” food by 2020.

The real food calculator is exciting because it provided students with an opportunity to address global food issues on a community scale. The industrial food system as it exists today is detrimental to both the environment and human life. Monoculture crops and the exorbitant usage of pesticides and fertilizers have led to massive runoff and created massive dead zones in the oceans. The overproduction of corn and soy, particularly GMO corn has led to the creation multitudes of unhealthy over processed food-like substance. Further, labor practices in both the food service and farming/processing industries are some of the worst out of all US industry. Students can address these food and sustainability issues on their own campus and make positive, if incremental changes by altering how their university buys food.

The calculator is also exciting because its accounts for two of the major criticisms of the food movement: 1) that it is too focused on the individual and 2) that it ignores workers.  The food movement of Michael Pollan and other thinkers has tended to focus on what individuals should do to improve the health of themselves and their families. They can shop at farmers markets, avoid processed food, or start their own farm or garden. While these actions are beneficial they fall into what Maniates calls the individualization of responsibility whereby people try to address systemic problems by focusing on individual choice instead of larger systemic solutions.  By focusing on changing the purchasing of larger institutions and getting them to make “real” food as part of their governing policies students can have a much larger impact. Further, the food movement has often ignored the people who grow or cook food. The real food calculator takes labor practices to be fundamental part of its definition of “real.”