Editor’s Note: Author Elizabeth Keyser received the Connecticut Press Club’s “Best Feature for the Web 2010″ award for this article.

By Elizabeth Keyser

For 25 years, John Turenne fed large amounts of food to large numbers of people —food was a commodity and the criteria was cost. Then he had an epiphany.

Today, Turenne, president and founder of Sustainable Food Systems in Wallingford, CT, is the leader in the movement to bring sustainable food to large institutions like universities, hospitals, and school districts. Recently, he led the behind-the-scenes team that made Jamie Oliver’s “Food Revolution” work in the Huntington, West Virginia school system.

Turenne’s solid background in the conventional food industry makes him eminently suited for his innovative role in the sustainable food movement. During his career with Aramark, the mammoth food services corporation, Turenne managed dining programs at Wesleyan, Choate Rosemary Hall school, and Yale.

“My performance was based on dollars and cents rather than common sense,” he says, “How well I performed for my company was based on how much we could reduce costs.”  That meant reducing the cost of labor and food, while increasing efficiency and sales.  With fewer cooks to prepare food, the answer was to increase the use of processed food. Convenience over quality.

One day in the fall of 2001, as he prepared to feed 6,000 students at a Yale Bowl football game, he got a telephone call. Yale’s president wanted him to come to his office to meet a parent.

The parent was Alice Waters.  Waters, the owner of Chez Panisse, the celebrated restaurant in Berkeley, California known for sourcing from local farms, had become a missionary in the sustainable food movement. Her interest in Yale’s food was personal. Her daughter Fannie had just entered Yale.

Waters asked for a tour of Yale’s kitchen.  “That was the lightening strike,” says Turenne, “I gave her the tour. She gave me a copy of ‘Fast Food Nation.’ ”  Waters inscribed the book, “This is required reading.”

Sustainable food? Turenne didn’t know what it was. Waters took him under her wing.  “She made me understand the impact food has. That’s when I realized food has a face and a story, and that story could be wonderful or not so wonderful.”   He learned about the damage big  corporate food causes to animals, people and the earth.

Food was central – what other thing on the planet was integral to environment, community, animals and people, and health and nutrition?

Turenne’s immediate task was making Waters’ vision workable at Yale. Yale’s president wanted Turenne “to make the client happy.” Turenne was mindful that Chez Panisse fed 100 people a night using a small army of chefs.  Turenne was feeding 600 people three times a day with three chefs.

He designed and implemented a nationally recognized program that was expanded to Yale’s 12 dining halls, and continues to this day. Turenne adapted the processes he learned over his career.  He limited the choice of food, keeping labor costs down, minimizing overproduction and waste. “Imagine the amount of waste having so many stations. That’s not cost-effective.”  He “creatively orchestrated menus,” increasing costs in some areas, decreasing costs in other.  ”The apple costs more but you’re not throwing out 10 apples.”

Designing the program at Yale changed his life. “I decided I’m not going back,” he said.  He told Aramack the industry had to change.  They weren’t ready for change, but Turenne was. He started Sustainable Food Systems so he and his team could execute his mission of  “Making the world a better place through food.” In the last 10 years he’s consulted for and implemented sustainable food programs in schools, hospitals and corporations, including Harvard Medical School, the New Hampshire Department of Education, Kaiser Permanente and the Culinary Institute of America.

In Huntington, West Virginia, he not only had to redesign the lunch program, he had to assuage the Jamie Oliver-induced bruised egos of cafeteria and school district staff. “They’d look at us with dagger eyes. Many school food service directors are afraid.” But Turenne understands where they are coming from. He’s been there. “I could leverage the fact I’d come from a conventional food industry. Not many people can say that. It’s empathy and response,  a style and reputation.”

“Our process is first to identify where they are and where they want to go.  We don’t go in and say let’s change the menu or recipes. We facilitate. You guys drive the boat.   Then we’ll look at the ingredients and say, here’s an alternative. ”  Turenne introduced a vegetable-rich homemade tomato sauce, added pureed beans to the Sloppy Joes, and broccoli to pasta and cheese.  He learned to make the most of the USDA Commodity Food Program; instead of getting processed chicken nuggets, he could order real, whole meat chicken.

“As the USDA sees the demand for fresh and raw, they’ll start to provide more,” he said, “It’s supply and demand.”

Whether at home or in an institution, change happens in increments.  Baby steps lead to leaps and bounds. Turenne mentions a friend whose first step was  ”I’m going to buy better milk.”  Today he’s buying from CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture).

What makes Turenne proudest?  “What fills my heart with the most pride is when I see the actual stakeholders  of the institutions- the cooks, the food service directors — become the champions of the cause, just like I did at Yale.”  And when Turenne’s Sustainable Food Systems team leaves a client site, the new sustainable food program will be sustainable only through the work of these stakeholders.

In West Virginia, it is. The cooks and staff are behind the program “because ultimately it’s good for the kids.” They said, “We can’t imagine going back to doing what we were doing.”

Q:  What’s your favorite winter, spring, summer or fall food/dish?

Ice cream, ice cream, ice cream and ice cream! If not ice cream, then I’d say: Winter – Chili (lots of different ways); Spring – using rhubarb any way I can; Summer – firing up the wood fired grill for real and grill everything, soup to nuts; Fall – putting food from the garden up (canning) to enjoy in winter.
Q:  What’s your favorite family meal to cook?

Pizza.  We get the kids involved from dough to topping to eating.  It’s best when their friends are over and I hear things like  ” I didn’t know you could put that on pizza!?”

Q:  Name one thing you’d like to see changed in CT Ag, National Ag, and the National School Lunch Program?

CT Ag:  work to get more mid-sized farms that can work with the volume of institutions like schools, colleges, hospitals to provide fresh and local food to their food services.

National AG: fix the perverted USDA standards for the national school lunch program.  Don’t tell me frozen French fries are okay and fresh vegetables are not.

School Lunch:  Schools need the USDA donated food program.  Let’s make that food fresh and unadulterated, not frozen, highly processed, and loaded with ingredients and chemicals I cannot begin to pronounce – junk!

Q:  Please give one recommendation for families trying to eat more healthfully and sustainably or schools seeking to serve more healthful lunches?

I have the same advice for both families and schools:  Eat Real Food.  Eat in season when you can and source locally when you can.  Cook with the kids. Get their hands in the food (wash them first).  Teach them  where food really comes from (carrots actually grow underground!)

Visit Sustainable Food System web site to learn more: http://www.sustainablefoodsystems.com/