cafeteria provides humane-friendly food choices for students
Author:
Taryn Hubbard
Publication:
Langara Voice
Publication Date:
November 20, 2008
Students can choose to eat eco-responsible food at school with the arrival of new fish and egg products.
There’s nothing fishy about the seafood served in the cafeteria at Langara College. In fact, all the seafood served in the cafeteria is sustainable and environmently-friendly since Compass Group Canada, owner of the Chartwells chain, adopted a new seafood program last June.
“We as a company are Ocean Wise,” said Jon Wong, food services director at Langara. Ocean Wise is a Vancouver Aquarium program that promotes consumer awareness about sustainable seafood. The Ocean Wise program endorses sustainable fish on the recommendations of marine conservation organizations like Sea Choice Canada.
These organizations research how fish are being caught.
“We look at the species abundance to see if the stocks are nice and healthy or depleted. We also look at the natural resilience of the species,” said Kelly Johnson, an Ocean Wise program assistant. Not all methods of fishing are sustainable, according to the Ocean Wise website.
Overfishing, fishing that damages habitat, and bycatching, which is when species are removed from their habitat unintentionally, all create unsustainable fishing industries.
“A net can be as wide as a football field, they can be as tall as five stories and can hold up to a hundred jumbo jets,” said Johnson.
In the Langara cafeteria, tuna sandwiches are now made with Albacore tuna that is not netted when caught, Wong said.
“We are trying to make really good choices [at Langara],” Amie Olsen, secretary at the facilities and purchasing department at Langara, said.
The move to serve Ocean Wise fish comes after last year’s decision by Chartwells and Langara to use only cage-free eggs.
“We are more socially responsible,” Wong said.
Langara was the first educational institution in Canada to switch from battery caged eggs to cage-free eggs.
Eggs are considered cage-free when the hens either roam around the barn, which is called free-run eggs, or walk around the farm, which is called freerange eggs.
Battery cages, on the other hand, restrict the freedom of the hens.
“There are usually about five hens on average per cage and gives each hen less space than what you’d get on a sheet of paper. They are obviously much bigger animals than that. So they are cramped very tightly together. They can barely move, let alone flap their wings, bath, perch, or nest and these are all fundamentally important behaviours to hens,” said Leanne McConnachie, director of farm animal programs at the Vancouver Humane Society.
Since Langara switched to cooking with cage-free eggs, they have not had any problems keeping the eggs in stock, Wong said.
