All of the food officially sold on campus, from Arredondo Café to Starbucks, is controlled by Aramark, a private corporation with a shady history at UF.

These are the people who decide what food businesses are allowed to operate on campus and what meal plans are offered.

The only place that non-Aramark food can be bought is through the daily Krishna Lunch program, and this is only achieved by not charging for their food but through the use of “mandatory donations.”

The administration fell under heavy criticism in 2007 and 2008 for the rewarding of a non-competitive 10-year contract to Aramark without student input. The placement of a registered lobbyist for Aramark sitting on the Board of Trustees, the highest governing body of UF and the conveyor of the contract, has brought its partiality under suspicion.

Aramark mainly generates their revenue from food sales through the use of captive audiences–people who cannot choose another food option.Their target market includes prisoners, oil rig workers, concert-goers and the meal plans sold to freshmen at the University of Florida.

From 2007-2008 students did not eat 38.6 percent of meals on their plan but were still charged for them. With the cheapest meal plan costing $1,600, many students found themselves out of much-needed cash. According to the UF administration, this has improved recently because now 85 percent of meals plans bought are unlimited. Nonetheless, these contracts are expensive and are notoriously difficult to cancel.

The system designed by Aramark makes it next to impossible to get out of a meal plan. The three ways to change a meal plan are:

1. Join a fraternity or sorority with a mandatory meal plan. Students are still required to pay the difference in costs between the two.
2. Transfer to a declining balance account during the grace period (until Aug. 27 and Jan. 3 -Jan. 7). These credits roll over to each consecutive semester and can be refunded when you leave UF.
3. Graduate, withdraw or transfer from UF.

The majority of students, faculty and staff surveyed in spring 2009 believed that eating on campus was more expensive than eating off campus.

Aramark decided to advertise specials more heavily instead of reducing their prices in an attempt to obscure the problem. A similar survey conducted in Fall of 2009 found an over all satisfaction rate of 5.38 out of 7, mostly due to the high costs, lack of food variety and limited hours of operation.

Aramark has recently started taking students’ opinions into consideration more. When Pollo Tropical and Cheeburger Cheeburger opened with more expensive menus, the students noticed and brought it to their attention. The menus where quickly changed to reflect their contemporaries on other universities inside the state.

Aramark has recently agreed to extend their hours of operations at residential dining facilities, introduce healthier options, expand vegetarian/vegan food, and open gluten-free stations at the behest of the students. Aramark also agreed to increase the pay 1.5 cents per pound for tomatoes purchased from Immokolee that goes directly to the farm workers in part due to the urging by the student body.

A better dining experience is possible but only through continued student involvement in decision making.

The unfair meal plans, marginal input from students, and their questionable contractual dealings leave few redeeming qualities of on-campus dining.

If students are inclined to question why UF continues to do business with Aramark they need to look no further than the bottom line. In 2007 UF made $2.5 million off the contract with an expected increase each year. With these high stakes, there is little hope that on-campus dining will have any meaningful change without strong student pressure.

UF Student/Farmworker Alliance members heard the decision on March 22.

“We had heard from the [Coalition of Immokalee Workers] two weeks ago in a phone call that they were 99 percent sure that Aramark would cave,” said Jeremiah Tattersall, a member of UF’s chapter of the SFA. “After that one percent to came through, it was all hugs. We were just so happy. Two things we kept repeating after that: ‘activism works!’ and ‘the Left got a win!’”

This decision was reached after lobbying from CIW and a series of on-campus protests against Aramark held by the SFA in conjunction with CIW.

In talks, Aramark specifically mentioned the pressure it was feeling on college campuses, which are essential to its line of business. Because of this, students at UF used their combined powers to directly help farmworkers achieve better conditions.

When students started the campaign to force Aramark to concede to CIW’s demands in September 2009, they hosted members of CIW to speak on campus, held a large rally that marched to the Reitz Union, convinced Student Government to issue a resolution calling for Aramark to meet with CIW, and passed out pamphlets to new UF students and Preview attendees.

“Finally, Aramark flew a few of their vice presidents down from Philadelphia to meet with us for over an hour, where we clearly stated that the campaign would escalate until Aramark met the CIW’s demands, and only a few weeks later, we heard the news that Aramark had capitulated,” said Richard Blake, member of SFA.

“Together with Aramark and our other partners, we are building a system of real accountability with tangible consequences for growers who fail to protect farmworkers’ basic rights,” said CIW’s Lucas Benitez, in a statement. “It is our belief that such accountability, with worker input, will be the foundation for lasting improvements in the industry.”

Similar to those previously reached between CIW and other food service and restaurant groups, the agreement establishes a supplier code of conduct developed and implemented with input from farmworkers themselves.

For those of us who spend $2 to $3 on a pound of tomatoes in the grocery store, a 1.5-cent increase doesn’t sound like much. But this will effectively double the average farmworker’s wage, making it possible to earn $100 on a good day rather than $50, accordingly to a press release from CIW.

CIW, “community-based worker organization,” has three demands that form the mainstay of an ongoing campaign for farmworkers’ rights.
Currently, tomato pickers in Immokalee are paid 40 cents to 45 cents for each 32-pound bucket of tomatoes they pick. The additional 1.5 cents per pound represents the first wage increase for Florida tomato pickers since 1978.

“We have addressed concerns about these issues with our major suppliers and, amongst other things, have put processes in place that will demand greater transparency in our purchasing channel,” said Robert Dennill, the associate vice president of corporate responsibility for Aramark.

CIW counts previous major victories in getting Taco Bell, McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway, Whole Foods Market and Compass Group, a food service provider similar to Aramark, to sign on to the 1.5-cent increase.

UF’s SFA will be targeting Publix next. It is planning the Farmworker Freedom March from Tampa to Publix’s headquarters in Lakeland to pressure the company to sign a similar agreement.

Update: In yet another victory for the Immokalee workers, Aramark has agreed to the CIW’s demands, and agreed to a 1.5-cent-per-pound increase on the tomatoes it buys, as well as mandating that its suppliers adhere to a code of conduct in their treatment of workers.

Executives from Aramark met with members of the UF Student/Farmworker Alliance to discuss the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ demands on Feb. 16.

“They told us ‘we’ve paid attention to your grievances,’” said Jose Soto, a member of the UF SFA and a doctoral student in food and resource economics. “But we’ve made it clear that Aramark’s captive market, the student population of the University of Florida, has passed a resolution asking them to negotiate with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. Without worker involvement, any changes will be temporary at best.”

When a UF student opens up a sandwich bought on campus, it will likely contain one slice of tomato. A regular tomato will yield eight slices suitable for a hamburger or sandwich. A pound of tomatoes contains, on average, 3.5 tomatoes, or 28 slices.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a self-described “community-based worker organization,” has three demands that form the mainstay of an ongoing anti-slavery campaign. At the core of its fight is a wage increase of 1 cent for every pound of tomatoes picked by workers in the fields. Their other demands consist of the establishment of a code of conduct between growers and pickers, as well as an open dialogue between tomato buyers, suppliers and pickers.

This 1 cent per pound translates to one twenty-eighth of a cent toward the cost of a hamburger or other sandwich.
This same one twenty-eighth of a cent may mean the difference between a guilt-free meal from one that is the product of slavery, Soto said.

Since 1997, the CIW has worked with the U.S. Department of Justice toward the successful prosecution of seven cases of modern-day slavery.

Currently, tomato pickers are paid 40 cents to 45 cents for each 32-pound bucket of tomatoes they pick. An additional 1 cent per pound would represent the first wage increase for Florida tomato pickers since 1978.
Aramark officials said in conferences with the CIW that the biggest roadblock the company faced with regard to reaching an agreement with the CIW was a lack of suitable tomato suppliers who could satisfy their enormous demand.

However, members of the UF SFA and Gainesville Students for a Democratic Society remain optimistic about the prospect of getting Aramark to sign onto the CIW’s demands.

“There has been a lot of campus activity nationwide,” Soto said. “A lot of people around the country have been, in some ways, replicating the work that we’ve been doing to put pressure on Aramark.”

The CIW counts major victories in getting Taco Bell, McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway, Whole Foods Market and Compass Group, a food-service provider similar to Aramark, to sign on to the 1 cent increase.

“These dreams are crystallizing with every victory,” said CIW member Gerardo Reyes in a conference call. “This has only been possible because of the participation of every person who has been a part of this campaign, who understands that what we’re asking for is necessary and possible.”

The thick packet of literature included stories like “Immokalee family sentenced for slavery,” “Apartheid in America” and “A more-complete definition of ‘sustainable.’” By the time we arrived in the desolate town, just after midnight, we felt confident in our school-child ability to recite the labor history of this town and felt briefed on the ultimate reason for our visit.

After becoming fed up with the impoverished condition that enslaved them, migrant workers started a grassroots organization called the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) in 1993. These workers, mostly immigrants from Honduras, Guatemala and Haiti, had already experienced both verbal and physical abuse since their arrival in the U.S. Most of them could remember a time when, back in their own countries, they survived as subsistence farmers — selling crops and living on corn, squash, beans and, most importantly, their own autonomy. They weren’t rich, but they were dignified.

But after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was established between the U.S., Canada and Mexico, these small-time farmers could not compete with subsidized crops from the States. Before, Mexico was a major wheat exporter. Now, Mexico only exports cheap labor.

“I think of myself as a son of NAFTA,” CIW staff member Lucas Benitez said. Poverty and exploitation forced these people north, where they hoped conditions would improve. But in Immokalee, the reality was much different.

As we pulled up to the CIW headquarters, a man whom we only knew through e-mails warmly greeted us. Marc Rodriguez, the national coordinator of the Student/Farmworker Alliance (SFA), directed us to our sleeping quarters — the Immokalee Non-Profit Housing children’s care center, about two miles away. Finally settling down among baby toys and children’s books in Spanish, it dawned on us that we had barely scratched the surface of this town.

The next morning, about 150 people convened in an old church for the official start of the fifth annual CIW/SFA Encuentro. “The meeting,” aimed at campaign strategy for the upcoming year, brought together students and activists from across the U.S. with the like-minded goal of working in solidarity to bring positive change to the lives of migrant farmworkers in Immokalee. After an introduction to the Student/Farmworker Alliance, Benitez and several other members of the CIW filled in a few more gaps in our knowledge of the coalition’s history.

In 1995, the CIW held its first major action. After Pacific Tomato Growers threatened to cut workers’ pay from the minimum wage $4.25 an hour to $3.85 an hour, more than 3,000 farmworkers went on strike for one week without compensation, including nearby citrus workers acting in solidarity, and built alliances with local church groups, schools and universities. The pressure was so great that the company announced it would instead increase the hourly wage to $5.25.

Unfortunately, not all growers were as responsive as Pacific Tomato Growers. In fact, after this first event, it became frustratingly difficult to convince growers to yield to the CIW’s demands of a wage increase of one penny more per pound of tomatoes and to follow a human rights code of conduct.

So the coalition began to research every link in the food supply chain and noticed a striking trend. No matter who the players were, the line of succession was always the same — the food suppliers pull all the strings from the top; the growers act as the strings being pulled; and the farmworkers dangle like marionettes at the bottom.

This system is apparent within the makeup of UF’s own food supplier, Aramark Ltd.

“We strive to offer clients and customers fresh whole foods that are raised, grown, harvested, and produced locally and in a sustainable manner whenever possible. And we partner with suppliers to increase the availability of such foods,” Aramark states on its web site.

However, Aramark is constantly being ridiculed for not living up to its self-mandated standards of ensuring a sustainable supply chain of workers at the ends of its own puppet cabaret: workers like those in Florida who pick roughly 90 percent of the country’s tomato supply while reaping little, if any, of its profits.

On Martin Luther King Day in 2001, the CIW took a bold step to bring farmworkers a little closer to their suppliers. They officially threatened a nationwide Taco Bell boycott outside of the Mexican fast-food chain in Ft. Myers. Three months later, they presented a list of demands to Taco Bell: meet with the CIW and tomato growers to discuss possible solutions to farmworkers’ problems, contribute to an immediate wage increase per pound of tomatoes picked, and join the CIW to draft wage and working conditions standards to be required of all Taco Bell tomato suppliers.

Three years and thousands of protest signs later, Taco Bell folded. The “Boot the Bell” campaign by students and farmworkers was so successful that the victory received Mother Jones’ “Campus Activism Victory of the Year” award.

Taco Bell set the bar, and the rest dropped like flies. McDonald’s, Burger King and eventually all of Yum Brands (Burger King’s supplier), Whole Foods, Subway, and Bon Appétit agreed to pay the people who pick their tomatoes one penny more per pound, as well as agreeing to follow a code of conduct for growers and suppliers.

These victories created an astounding precedent, proving that a group of farmworkers with little to no legal protection could organize, take on huge corporations and actually see a response to their demands.

Back at the Encuentro, everyone prepared for a walking tour, filling their water bottles and gathering big-brimmed hats and sunglasses. We trudged down the sad, steamy roads of the migrant housing neighborhood, stopping in the shaded areas in front of various points. The first site was a small trailer park stuffed with dinky green trailers with bright “for rent” signs shining through their dusty window panes. Our guides Silvia Perez and Melody Gonzalez explained that the dilapidated trailers — most of them lacking basic amenities like AC and hot water — were owned by tomato growers in the area and rented out to migrants for a going rate of $60 per person per week. The growers have the ability to charge outlandish prices for several reasons, including proximity to pick-up points for work and the lack of a housing market demand by residents other than the workers.

A few blocks away, we stopped across the street of the next site — a nonchalant house that looked like its inhabitants had been gone for several weeks. Our guides, apprehensive about getting any closer to the house, began to unfold the tale of its history:

Just one year ago, the owner of this house and several others were arrested and charged with modern-day slavery. Gonzalez, in her rustic Spanish accent, explained that about a year and a half ago a large U-haul was nestled in the driveway. The chain lock around the U-haul was not to keep people out, but to keep them in.

In a fashion similar to the years just after the American Civil War, tomato growers were holding immigrants hostage as indentured servants, working to pay off their “debt” to the growers for bringing them to the U.S. In essence, the growers were smuggling people from Latin America into the States and then enslaving them — making them work long, stringent hours for little or no pay and charging outlandish prices like $5 to shower outside with a hose and bucket and even more obscene amounts for food and water.

And all this was happening within an afternoon’s drive from Gainesville.

In 2008, one enslaved worker escaped and informed the CIW of his condition. The coalition created an uproar, attracting media outlets from across the country and bringing the growers to trial. The tomato farmers were sentenced to 50 years in prison by a federal court for practicing modern-day slavery.

Now, the CIW is turning its attention back to the penny-per-pound campaign. After the coalition forced so many corporations to come to the table, they were ready for something larger: the overarching food service providers, like Aramark, that organize and manage food courts and dining services on campuses, workplaces, tourist destinations and even prisons nationwide. This newest campaign, aptly named “Dine with Dignity,” is in full swing across the country, focusing not only on Aramark, but also Sodexo and Compass food service providers, as well as corporate grocers like Publix and Kroger.

Already Compass has come to the table.

UF just renewed a 10-year contract with Aramark in June of this year while many students were away for the summer, allowing it to pass without protest. But several groups, including the Students for a Democratic Society, The Fine Print and the newly formed Gainesville Student/Farmworker Alliance are not allowing it to go unnoticed.

Concerned students presented a resolution at the UF Student Senate meeting on Sept. 22, which, if signed, would have strongly urged Aramark representatives at UF to enter into negotiations with the CIW. That same night, a different resolution concerning Aramark’s purchase of sweatshop-made clothing was also presented.

It passed with flying colors, but the CIW resolution was not so lucky.

But this hasn’t killed the campaign. In fact, “Dine with Dignity” is swiftly making its presence known on UF’s campus through fliers, petitions and collaboration with student groups on campus, as well as a number of fiery letters to the editor of The Independent Florida Alligator.

In addition, the CIW will be hosting a popular education rally in Gainesville on Saturday, Oct. 23, fully outfitted with the elaborate display of street theater and activist artwork that has made the coalition so well-received around the country. The rally will begin on UF’s campus to protest Aramark and then will head to the Publix at 125 S.W. 34th St. Later, there will be a presentation at the Civic Media Center at 433 S. Main St.

Students and community members looking to get involved are asked to send an e-mail to GainesvilleSFA@googlegroups.com, and sign the petition.

By the Numbers:
- 53 percent of farmworkers in the U.S. are undocumented, according to a 2005 survey by the U.S. Department of Labor.

- 2 million farmworkers have been driven out of business since the enactment of NAFTA in 1994.

- 40 cents is the amount paid to workers in Immokalee for every 32-pound bucket of tomatoes they harvest, which equals $.0125 per pound. Workers can pick between 15 and 27 buckets per hour, according to a UF study.

- Farmworkers have not received a raise per bucket since 1980:

Year                Minimum Wage                    buckets/hour (to receive min. wage)

1980                $3.10/hour                            8
1997                $5.15                                    13
2007                $6.67                                    17
2008                $7.25                                    18

• With a 1 penny-per-pound increase:

future                $7.25                                    10

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 lobbyist 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 on campus 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 a food service provider 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 as oil gets more expensive, it will likely have to change more.

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.

The Gainesville Sun recently quoted Stefanie Hamblen, editor of local gardening guide Hogtown HomeGrown, saying, “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 likely 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.

Environmental writer Bill McKibben once 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 begin to develop answers to those questions.

The bidding process was not competitive, and appears to have limited competition by design.

Many students haven’t even heard of the company, Aramark Ltd., which has run Gator Dining Services for 14 years. Its logo does not appear in dining halls or the Reitz Union.

The UF food service contract was worth nearly $24 million during the 2006-2007 school year, and its value tends to grow by more than $1 million a year, according to financial data included with the university’s proposal.

The new contract, which is being signed with only cosmetic changes as we go to press, will take effect in July of 2009. There are also two 5-year options to renew, potentially extending the terms until 2029, according to UF’s proposal.

Aramark promotes itself as an outsourcing company that provides “value-added services.” They made $12.6 billion last year handling things like food and laundry for stadiums, oil rigs, prisons and universities.

Whether these arrangements benefit anybody but Aramark is unclear. On our campus, upperclassmen overwhelmingly avoid meal plans, one of Aramark’s most profitable sources of business. Some 38.6 percent of meals purchased by students through meal plans go uneaten, even though they’re paid for in advance.

Some students have charged that the company is a parasite with an incentive to provide bad service – the more missed meals and the less food it serves, the greater its savings and the higher its profits.

The company lacks incentives to make the changes students demand. There will always be another class of freshmen to exploit the next year. They don’t find out what a bad deal meal plans are until after they’ve signed on to a meal plan, and can’t always cook in their dorms.

Meal plans at UF are voluntary, unlike at some institutions. But people who live, work and study campus depend on Aramark for food, a trend which will only increase as UF’s evolving parking plan makes it increasingly difficult to leave campus for lunch. Public institutions like UF provide a guaranteed market where the company enjoys an enforced monopoly.

Aramark’s business model revolves around captive customer bases. Some of company’s most profitable business comes from taxpayers, and it has a history of scamming Floridians.

In 2001, Aramark got an exclusive contract to run food service for the Florida Department of Corrections. Since then, audits and other internal communications have repeatedly shown the state may have been getting cheated.

In 2006 the department found that if it handled its own food service, it could rehire staff laid off by Aramark, increase the quality of food, and serve 5 percent more meals, all while saving taxpayers $7 million a year, according to the St. Petersburg Times.

In 2007, the department’s inspector general “found that Aramark had pocketed a $10.5-million windfall by charging for meals it never served and by substituting cheaper ingredients without approval,” according to a Times editorial.

In February, outgoing Department of Corrections secretary James R. McDonough wrote a letter to the Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, Mark Rubio. He condemned Aramark’s proposed plan for dealing with budget cuts, which involved a 30-percent reduction in the calories it would serve inmates each day.

Aramark claimed the reductions would pose no threat to inmates’ health.

“This is a line of bologna that I find both unpalatable and not credible,” McDonough wrote.

Aramark was proposing new cuts that would be so bad for prisoners that McDonough warned the department could face lawsuits for violating the 8th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which bans cruel and unusual punishment.

In prisons, hungry inmates start fights and riots. Bad food in the canteens can compromise the safety of prison guards and the general public, the letter noted.

But when Aramark proposed the feeding cuts, it had other concerns, McDonough wrote.

“The matter at hand here is Aramark’s profit margin,” he concluded.

Aramark is not in the business of providing real value to its customers – including students and taxpayers. It’s in the business of making as much money as possible, an aim that conflicts with the public mission of the prison system, as well as the University of Florida.

As The Palm Beach Post reported on March 29, “The company is paid not by the
number of meals consumed but by the number of inmates. If fewer inmates eat the food, Aramark can save money by providing less food.”

Substitute “inmates” with “freshmen who purchase meal plans,” and you get the idea.

Proponents of privatization say it can increase efficiency. The problem is that increased efficiency means more profits for contractors, but not necessarily better service. That’s especially true when private contracts aren’t subject to competition.

Under McDonough’s watch, the Department of Corrections re-negotiated its contract, opening food service to a second provider, Trinity Foodservice Inc. The new contract reigned in Aramark’s profiteering and made other improvements, like requiring the company to provide a greater variety of vegetables to juvenile prisoners, as recommended by the Department of Education.

Officials have said they are now getting a better deal, and that their concerns with Aramark have been resolved.
On the other hand UF’s new contract locks us into at least 10 years without competition.

Some students are concerned about their rights on campus under the contract. Aramark and its Classic Fare Catering enjoy the exclusive right to serve food in the Reitz Union and any other building with a Gator Dining Facility. Student groups can’t even bring outside coffee and doughnuts to meetings in those buildings.

In 2006, a group of students tried to start their own coffee shop on campus. A referendum on their efforts appeared on the ballot in Fall 2007 campus elections, and 75 percent of voters supported the measure.

In a letter to The Alligator, Skeet Surrency explained the project:

“As a nonprofit cafe, our services would be brought to students at-cost, meaning we will sell goods only to cover operating expenses – not for profits. This translates into lower prices for consumers and would allow us to source high quality fair-trade and organic products while remaining cost competitive with other coffee shops on campus.”

That sort of cost competition violates Aramark’s right to an on-campus monopoly guaranteed in its contract, so the company helped put the kibosh on the student-run cooperative.

There is no provision in the new contract to soften the ban on student entrepreneurship.

There is also no concrete requirement that Aramark reduce the number of meals missed by students on meal plans, though the university is working to help make using meal plans more convenient, by accepting the plans at Home Zone and looking into other options in the future, according to Gator Dining officials.

The bidding process for the new contract was not competitive, but it does not appear to have violated university regulations, which only require a response from a second company, not an actual bid.

A second company, Chartwells, responded to the initial requests for a proposal, but felt it did not have enough time to overcome the advantages Aramark enjoyed as the incumbent or other obstacles posed by the bidding procedure, according to company spokesman Jerry Bradley.

The university publicly announced it was soliciting bids on November 5, 2007, almost two years before the existing contract was set to expire.

Bidding officially opened on Nov. 19, and bids were due on Jan. 10, right after students returned to school. That time frame meant competitors would have almost no chance to survey the campus because the university would be closed for Thanksgiving and Winter Breaks.

The unwieldy bidding schedule seems to have stifled competition, a problem the university could have solved by re-submitting its request. Since the new contract doesn’t take effect until July 2009, there would have been plenty of time.

However, the university officials charged with handling contracts are spread thin. They do not have the time or the resources to ensure every bid is competitive, especially for things like food service, which can’t be interrupted while competitive bids are sorted out.

Privatization is now the way we do business in Florida. Rather than giving university officials the resources to do what’s in the best interest of students, Florida officials have decided they would rather pay an overworked, downsized staff to bring in private companies to work out the details at a profit, and pass the costs on to us.

The trend of hollow government, which began in earnest under Jeb Bush and continues to this day, is only good for well-connected companies.

The real problem isn’t the level of competition in the bidding process, but the limited scope of what the university was looking for in the first place – a private outsourcing deal. This comes at a time when other universities are abandoning privatized food service for something more sensible and sustainable. Bringing in a different parasitic corporation with a competitive bid would only have been a minor improvement, at a time when food service on other college campuses is changing dramatically.

Yale University began its Sustainable Food Project (YSFP) in 2003, while it was under contract with Aramark. When Aramark first arrived on campus in 1998, Yale Dinning Service’s budget increased by 50 percent.

“Students, dining staff, and Yale’s former food suppliers complained that the University was providing worse meals at a higher cost,” according to the Yale Daily News.

Since 2005 Yale has managed its own food service.

Yale’s 12 dining halls now serve sustainably produced, seasonal food from New England farmers. They avoid imports from far away, but make exceptions for fair trade coffee, bananas and chocolate, which students refused to do without.

In the early days of the YSFP, the dining hall at Berkley Residential College, home of the pilot program, had to turn students from the Yale’s other colleges away as they faked IDs and crowded around the doors trying to access the new sustainable fare, which achieved a level of gourmet previously unheard of in college cafeterias.

If Yalies can enjoy local food year-round in the harsh climate of New England, imagine what’s possible in Florida, where the growing season never ends.

Imagine if the states 11 public universities and 28 community colleges worked together to create economies of scale.

Here at UF, business and agricultural students could design and market new dining concepts on campus, as some had tried to do with the student-run coffee shop. Students from Santa Fe College’s culinary arts program could help create simple, sustainable recipes. Feeding students could become part of the educational process.

Right now, we’re in the middle of a global food crisis. In the near future, the global population will only increase and natural resources will become increasingly strained by climate change, soil depletion and increased scarcity of fossil fuels.

These challenges aren’t going away, and training our generation to deal with them in a way that allows us to eat tastier, more nutritious foods makes sense.

Yale’s program also helps local farmers by guaranteeing them a large market in advance and gives them an incentive to farm sustainably.

Universities around the country – including the University of Nebraska, a large public institution like ours – are using Yale’s model to reform food service on their campuses. As it tried to position itself as a sustainability leader, can UF afford to wait 10 to 20 years to follow suit?

Despite the vague rhetoric on its promotional brochures, Aramark’s way of doing business is anathema to real sustainability. The current dining system poses one of the greatest barriers to meeting a legitimate goal like UF’s Zero Waste by 2020 initiative.

Broward Dining, for example, is a logistical nightmare, almost guaranteed to produce mountains of waste.

In addition to the two featured dishes, every lunch and dinner includes the pasta station, the pizza station, the sandwich station, the salad bar, the wraps-or-melted-chesee-and-recycled-toppings-on-day-old-bread-station, the Latin section, Vegan Corner, the cereal tower and several self-serve aluminum vats of bubbling Lord-knows-what, before you even get to dessert.

>Whatever doesn’t get eaten gets tossed.

Some will argue that level of chaos creates jobs.

But so would a network of new and expanding organic farms and distributorships, with UF at the hub.

Picture simplicity: one or two delectable, nutritious main courses with a manageable assortment of attractive, seasonal sides; a worthy vegan option (as opposed to the typical dreary eggplant over crusty cous-cous); and something portable.

Yale has decided to use fewer but better ingredients. That’s responsible cost cutting, not to mention a better approach to waste reduction: if people eat the food, you don’t have to throw it away.

Yale has seen no trade-off between food quality and social responsibility. It has found the two go together. Outsourcing, mass production and the misguided desire to offer all things to all people all of the time – the principles that define companies like Aramark – have nothing to do with either of those.

For students who demand daily burgers and fries, there can still be Wendy’s and Burger King on a post-Aramark campus. It’s national brands like those (and the highly touted Moe’s) that help drive up Aramark’s high level of customer satisfaction on campus.

Among privatized campus food operations, UF’s is a model for the rest of the country. Lionel Dubay, head of UF’s Business Services Division, told me representatives from other colleges routinely tour our dining facilities for lessons in keeping them clean, modern and attractive.

But given the public mission of our university, and what is now a well-documented relationship between sound nutrition and academic performance, it may be time to ditch the middle man, keep its profits, and use them to finance a more sensible (and sustainable) approach to feeding ourselves.

The old contract allowed UF to reneg at any time with 90 days notice, so there’s a good chance we can get out of the new one without much trouble. For more on what a sustainable food program could look like at UF, as well as the specifics of the new contract and how we can break it, stay tuned for the next issue of the Fine Print.