University wins sustainability award
UWinnipeg cafeteria serving most sustainable campus meals in North America
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This article was published 04/09/2019 (2277 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
The University of Winnipeg has the most sustainable cafeteria in North America.
The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) has ranked the University of Winnipeg as the top Canadian campus for sustainable dining. The university also beat out schools stateside, in New York, Connecticut, and Vermont.
The ranking was issued on Aug. 26, measuring which post-secondary institutions were running a sustainable business, whether they were buying produce from local farms or employing workers from marginalized communities.
Kelly Andreas, the executive chef for Diversity Food Services at the University of Winnipeg, said it’s great to be an industry leader.
“It’s an honour and a privilege to be a leader in what we do. If you look around, you see more and more (restaurants) buying local, composting… It feels great to be a pioneer in this industry,” Andreas said. “It’s a common goal we should all strive to achieve.”
The University of Winnipeg scored 89 per cent on the 2019 index. The university beat out 336 other campuses from across Canada, the U.S., and overseas.
According to Andreas, achieving this milestone requires a lot of meticulous planning. Diversity Foods supplies Pangea’s Kitchen, the cafeteria located in Riddell Hall. Andreas said they build relationships with farmers, making sure that all the meat and vegetables they’re buying are locally sourced.
The company has a mandate to try and hire workers from marginalized communities, or workers with a challenge in the courts. Andreas said that for every dollar they make, around 70 cents goes back into the local Manitoba economy.
Diversity Foods also uses chicken that is 100 per cent raised without antibiotics. In order to do this, they had to come up with a new recipe for chicken fingers.
“There’s nobody in North America that produces (Raised Without Antibiotics) approved chicken fingers, which is one of our highest-selling food items here at Pangea’s Kitchen,” Andreas said. “We had to figure out, how’s that going to work? We could get chicken, but we can’t get chicken fingers. We had to learn how to make our own.”