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Below are some details and comments on on the food policy portion of today's Sustainable UH / Help Us Bridge (HUB) meeting.
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The first item of discussion for today's HUB meeting was around food policy.

Sustainable UH has decided to have a discussion led by experts in related fields from the community. The discussion will be open to the public.

The group agreed to a date of March 15 and a time of "evening" which I interpret to be between 6pm and 10pm. I am giving you this notice now in hopes that I can have good, solid representation from The Vegetarian Society of Hawaii, Animal Rights Hawaii, similar groups and supportive individuals like State Rep. Bertram. As specifics and details become available I will share them with you.

The focus of today's was kept on how to develop policy, who to invite / include, structure / type of discussion and basically what we would try to accomplish. An important question posed by Shanah in email and during today's meeting was, "how do we know if / when we've been successful?" but nobody really responded to that question in a convincing or confident way.

During a later part of the meeting when discussing if we should partner / ally with politicans one of the group members suggested that instead of appearing to support or endorse a candidate we could instead create a "report card" on candidates regarding their "sustainability".

My ideas:

I think such an approach might work well at least as a starting point for the food policy. Different foods, growers, distributors, vendors, etc. could be evaluated for carbon footprint, embodied energy, contributions to soil / water / air degradation, even effects on society and individual health. Such report cards would be posted at the entrance or ordering area for any vendors on campus. Additionally, low ranking entities could get fines or other disincentives for consistently low scores, could be excluded from future events like Earth Day activities, etc.
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