Who says one person can’t take on the system?  Not Louella Hill.  After being asked one night, while working at a catered dinner, to throw 85 fat fillets of salmon into “a big plastic-lined black hole,” she realized that what she wanted to do with her life was work to stop wanton waste and champion local eating.  “At that moment, I was also fired,” she remembers. 

It hardly matters.  Ever since that epic night, Louella has been fighting relentlessly for local food and farmers in Rhode Island.  Cheeky but well spoken, thoughtful and driven, this hippie manquée looks mild but doesn’t take easily to no for an answer.  After writing her Brown University senior thesis, “Localizing the Foodshed,” where she argued for the viability and need of connecting Rhode Island farmers with the state’s cafeterias (hotels, hospitals, universities), the college hired her to act as a “local food ambassador” post-graduation. 

Since then, Louella has started a farmer’s market on the Brown campus, organized weekend tours of local orchards, vegetable and dairy farms (in a natural-gas-powered van), run forums meant to connect New Englanders “from every link of the food chain,” pastured a dairy cow on the Brown campus in order to draw attention to the availability of local milk, purchased a CSA share for the university president, gotten students to shuck corn for the cafeteria kitchen in exchange for an “I Got Shucked” T-shirt, and gotten the kitchen to buy vegetables produced by the parents of Brown students (“I know it’s a little bit of a stretch,” says Louella’s boss Ginnie Dunleavy, “but if you define local in terms of community, not geography…”).  Does she sleep?  No one knows.

American university campuses have been one of the most powerful loci for the sustainable-foods movement.  Bates college in Maine spends a quarter of its food dollars on Maine-grown produce—impressive, given Maine’s short growing season—and recycles all its cooking scraps (the trash savings help defray the higher cost of organic produce).  Yale, prompted by Alice Waters once her daughter became a student, spends a $1.5 million a year on local produce, lamb, beef, milk and poultry, after which students allegedly began forging IDs to get into the cafeteria.  Vassar, Middlebury and Cornell have started growing their own produce on campus.  And at Brown, Louella soldiers on. 

Posted by Nathalie Jordi on May 14, 2007 at 11:35 AM
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