Ginna Allen, News Editor
This September, Sewanee claimed a new title as a top 10 performer in the recent publication of 2025 Sustainable Campus Index by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE). Among hundreds of other participating universities, Sewanee ranks seventh in the Food and Dining category with a score of 57.8% (calculated from a score of 4.62/8.00).
“This achievement underscores not only [Sewanee’s] dedication to advancing sustainability, but also the resilience of higher education at a time of significant global and societal challenges,” said AASHE’s Executive Director Meghan Fay Zahniser.
This percentage is determined by STARS (Sustainability Tracking and Rating System), a “transparent, self-reporting framework for colleges and universities to measure their sustainability performance” according to the AASHE website. With this 57.8%, Sewanee ranks in the “Silver” category, which indicates a significant commitment by Sewanee to integrate sustainability into its academic mission, campus operations, and community life. Not only this, but this recognition by the AASHE demonstrates Sewanee’s efforts towards publicly reporting data about sustainability performance and initiatives, and actively working towards continuous improvement in sustainability efforts. You can find Sewanee’s full, comprehensive Sustainability report on the AASHE website.
Partnered with the Office of Environmental Stewardship and Sustainability, Sewanee Dining incorporates various sustainable practices into their daily work. This includes composting, recycling, water conservation and food repurposing. The dining hall also works closely with the University Farm as a source for produce and a way to compost and reintegrate pre-consumer waste.
“It’s a round trip process for us. We take 10 tons of food waste from the dining hall and Stirlings and we turn that into compost. That compost is then used as fertilizer and soil amendment in our gardens and student built greenhouses,” said Carolyn Hoagland, University Farm Manager.
Partnered with composting, the farm works to include sustainable practices within their food crops and production: “It’s the core of what we do. When we’re thinking about how we farm, we use a process called regenerative farming. So we integrate animals and plants into an ecosystem that produces food. It also allows us to curate educational experiences for university students.” Hoagland also detailed the farm’s inclusion of cover crops, animal rotation, organic practices for food crops and student engagement in their sustainability efforts.
Local sourcing and fostering relationships with local farms in the Sewanee area is another important and impactful effort made by Dining Services that contributed towards their recognition by the AASHE.
“About 10% of our food budget comes from hyper local sources in a five country surrounding region,” said Caroline Thompson, Associate Director of Sewanee Dining. Thompson also referenced the Amish and Mennonite communities in the area that work with the dining hall to provide eggs, meat, lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers and a wide variety of fresh produce. “The local food scene has grown since I started in 2017. Those relationships are super important and I’d love to keep fostering that.”
Along with the benefits of local goods, these relationships provide a safe, stable source of produce during food recalls and national outbreaks, such as avian flu and E.coli. “We’ve weathered a lot of the tumultuousness in the food industry,” Thompson said.
The dining hall also takes any leftover food from past meals and repurposes it into a new dish for a following meal. If it cannot be repurposed, it is sent to the Parish of St. Mark & St. Paul to serve those in need in the surrounding community.
“Anything that’s left over we either try to repurpose in a soup or something like stuffed peppers with rice. But, we also have a partnership with the CAC down at St. Mark & St. Paul and they take our leftovers, put them into a tray, seal them and pass them out to people who need them,” Thompson said.
Looking to the future, Thompson hopes to figure out a way to compost and process the post-consumer waste seen in the large trash cans by dish drop off.
“The next thing we would love to do is to figure out how to process that waste. There have been talks about it and it sort of ebbs and flows with funding and interest. So we would love to have a biodigester that could process that waste,” Thompson said.
For the farm, Hoagland expressed future goals towards more efficient and consolidated food production through a central farm building.
“The farm has the capability to be more than we are now. Our main limitation is that we don’t have a functional farm building. So, there’s an opportunity to have more student engagement and to have more educational experiences for students if we had a place where we could be processing food,” Hoagland said.