Food and Freedom: The Truth About the Trouble with Aramark
Posted on 01. Oct, 2008 by Travis Pillow in Campus
Aramark Correctional Services plans to cut ties with the Florida Department of Corrections in September. It will serve its last meal to Florida prisoners on Jan. 9, 2009 due to the 90-day termination clause in its contract.
Aramark had the contract for a turbulent seven years, marked by fines and wrangling over budget cuts and profit margins. Now the department must find a new provider or figure out a way to feed inmates itself. Its challenges may shed new light on UF’s relationship with the company, which is set to continue through at least 2019.
Aramark won the DoC contract in 2001 as part of a larger drive by then-Gov. Jeb Bush to privatize government functions in Florida.
“The state rushed into it, and like most shotgun weddings, the marriage has been pretty tortured,” Rep. Dan Gelber, D-Miami Beach, told the St. Petersburg Times.
Aramark secured the deal with the help of lobbyist Courtney Cunningham, who is now a member of UF’s Board of Trustees.
Cunningham was appointed to the board in 2005 and remained registered as a lobbyist representing Aramark Correctional Services through at least October 2007, according to state disclosure forms.
He does not appear in the database for 2008. UF began taking bids on its food service contract in November 2007.
Aramark appears to have been driven away by a combination of budget cuts and food price inflation, which made it nearly impossible to turn a profit as the prison system demanded higher standards for quality of service.
That means it’s unlikely Florida prisons will attract another private food provider. They’ll likely have to handle food service themselves, which a report issued last year by the department’s inspector general said will help cut costs.
The department might lack the in-house expertise because Aramark took over the jobs of state employees charged with feeding prisoners.
UF faces similar troubles: a shrinking budget, increasing demands for better quality and costly sustainability initiatives, and an overtaxed Business Services Division with limited resources.
UF took nearly a year to finalize a new contract with Aramark, which had already been around for 12 years. Switching providers, let alone bringing food service back under university control, could have overwhelmed an already spread-thin Purchasing Department.
UF could have had to do without food on campus if Aramark decided to terminate its new contract. People have to eat, but we would only have a few months to work out an alternative.
That’s probably why Aramark gets such favorable terms from the university: we need them.
But the American food economy is changing, and it will likely have to change more.
In the 1990s, suddenly without lavish subsidies from the failing Soviet Union, Cuba was forced to take a crash course in sustainable agriculture. No longer able to afford pesticides, fertilizer or industrial farm equipment, Cubans created a system the rest of the world may try to emulate, the renowned environmental writer Billy McKibben reported in 2005.
Like Cuba in the nineties, Earth is an island with no known trading partners or external sources of hydrocarbons. As the New York Times reported on Aug. 3, “Cheap oil, the lubricant of quick, inexpensive transportation links across the world, may not return anytime soon, upsetting the logic of diffuse global supply chains that treat geography as a footnote in the pursuit of lower wages.”
Cubans had to eat the equivalent of one less meal for a few years, while the police state helped encourage the hungry to work the fields and not complain. Growing high yields and driving away tropical pests without modern chemicals required homegrown, specialized knowledge that was forgotten when boatloads of tractors started arriving from Russia.
According to McKibben, “To a very large extent, the rise of Cuba’s semi-organic agriculture is almost as much an invention of science and technology as the high-input tractor farming it replaced.”
Luckily, Cuba has one of the world’s highest rates of teachers per capita. The nation put the ingenuity of its university system to work, and the result was what McKibben called the “greener counterrevolution,” a radical (and successful) undoing of the so-called green revolution, which achieved unprecedented crop yields using industrial chemicals and machinery.
UF is in a unique position to help figure out how Florida can cope with a changing food economy. We’re at the heart of one of the most productive agricultural states in America, blessed with a 12-month growing season. The City of Gainesville boasts a wildly popular community garden program. As the Gainesville Sun reported: “Stefanie Hamblen, editor of Hogtown HomeGrown, said gardeners have begun calling their plots freedom gardens — as in freedom from oil.”
Not to mention the freedom that comes with guaranteed access to tastier, more nutritious food that doesn’t depend on the whims of corporations without roots in our community.
We’ll need to develop a sustainable food program alongside Aramark or in cooperation with them, at least for the time being.
With a few simple changes to the existing contract, student-run, sustainable enterprises can begin to compete with Aramark on campus, develop unique local concepts under its guidance, or help supply its food. We can guarantee a market for local farmers and provide them with cutting-edge research on sustainable farming methods.
McKibben pondered whether it was possible “…that there’s something inherently destructive about a globalized free-market society—that the eternal race for efficiency, when raised to a planetary scale, damages the environment, and perhaps the community, and perhaps even the taste of a carrot? Is it possible that markets, at least for food, may work better when they’re smaller and more isolated?“
By rediscovering how to feed ourselves, universities like our own can help answer those questions.
