This is another good question, Evan! While we certainly support your decision to purchase food from local manufacturers, your response to this credit should reflect its actual wording. This means that to meet the criteria you’ve described, food must be both grown and processed within 250 miles of the institution.  Part of the rationale for this criteria is that food which travels a shorter distance is more sustainable.

The STARS Team understands that with the existing food distribution system it is often difficult to determine where raw ingredients come from. However, you could contact the manufacturers and find out if they can pinpoint their sources. Additionally, as part of the regular maintenance to the STARS program, we are looking at possible improvements to the credits and the program as a whole. Several suggestions have been made for this particular credit. If you have suggestions to strengthen this credit or any other aspect of STARS, please feel free to share it with us at stars@aashe.org.

Margot

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Margot Hutchins
STARS Reporting Coordinator
Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education
margot.hutchins@aashe.org | 859-258-2551 ext. 122

Yes- any chance of people able to share this information?

This particular credit bears a huge burden of research. The grown AND processed means we really do need to verify hundreds of vendors and each of their products individually. Perhaps if this level of detail is needed AASHE can find some support from manufactures to make the data more public- or at least an easy way for STARS subscribers to find and share it together? If a product is 99% locally grown and processed- but has some ingredients that aren't- do you count it? This can get super nit-picky.

The dinning points- food system design- are often out of the specialty of a facilities based sustainability coordinator too- so its hard to know the level of information about all the topics in STARS without a bit more guidance.

Margot can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Evan that the issue is primary ingredients. In things like yogurt there are likely to be secondary spices (e.g. vanilla) that will never be grown within 250 miles of most of us. However yogurt that is processed locally from local milk should even if there are a very small % of other spices included.

As I recall, the bigger issue was that this was developed in response to folks who were trying to claim local food credit for things like locally roasted coffee, despite the fact that the coffee was grown several continents away. The "local foods" credits for some of the precursors to STARS were vague enough that they allowed you to get credit for locally roasted coffee or locally baked bread even if none of the main ingredients were grown locally.

-Roger