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College students continue to buy or be economically forced into purchasing foods saturated with ingredients that largely contribute to our planet’s deterioration. Palm oil, often found in foods ranging from ramen noodles to pizza dough, is responsible for accelerated tropical deforestation. The raising of cattle leads to 65% of greenhouse gas emissions within the livestock industry. Even more, the fishing industry accounts for close to 50% of all non-biodegradable pollution in the world’s oceans.

Food pollution, or environmental deterioration caused by the avoidable processes in growing, transporting, and packaging our foods, is running rampant across the globe. Pollution from our food systems must be solved. Unfortunately, over a billion people across the globe can not afford environmentally friendly alternative diet choices, making the issue of food pollution hard to overcome. 

College students, while also plagued by high tuition costs, are expected to buy into such environmental pollution through meal plans. Agriculture-based pollution is further perpetuated by colleges that mass produce food, an action that makes serving thousands of students easier but solving the climate crisis much harder. Thus, the rise of mass-produced food presents a global challenge.

Its symptoms can be seen at Syracuse University, too. 

SU’s Food Services, tasked with serving the campus community reliable and affordable meals, has addressed various aspects of the pollutive nature of modern food systems. 

Keone Weigl, marketing and promotions manager of Food Services, points toward Food Services’ current sustainability campaigns, such as the composting and donating of leftover food and the purchase of foods from local suppliers. But such programs are mere symptoms of a larger food production problem. Food should be produced in much smaller amounts so there’s no need for such programs.

Inexpensive foods are often the most impactful on the environment. PepsiCo, whose cups we often see littered around campus, are among the largest corporate polluters in the world.  

The public also lacks the choice to opt for greener choices: studies point to sustainable diets being unattainable for billions across the globe, especially within impoverished and low-income communities. 

Clearly, the issue is institutional. Efforts to reduce pollution downstream will only allow for the continuation of the source of the problem: corporate polluters.

Industries that pollute our food system directly impact Americans’ lives, and mitigating this threat is less profitable for those same industries. Agricultural polluters spend millions lobbying the federal government against climate and environmental regulation every year. 

Such pollution is not seen at the ground level, whether at the local Wegman’s or in SU dining halls. If pollution is out of sight, adopting pollution-reducing choices may seem economically infeasible. But to the contrary, allowing for more pollution from food systems is not the economically viable option.

Unchecked pollution by corporations costs a heavy toll. Plastic pollution, the majority of which is produced by the food and fishing industries, kills millions of marine animals each year. The continuance of greenhouse gas emissions pushes against climate change mitigation, too. 

With environmentally friendly diets still largely inaccessible, the pollution resulting from our food systems must be addressed at SU institutionally. 

Harrison Vogt is a sophomore environment sustainability policy and communication and rhetorical studies dual major. His column appears biweekly. He can be reached at hevogt@syr.edu. He can be followed on Twitter at @VogtHarrison.

Published on April 12, 2021 at 10:06 pm