In chapter 3 of Annie Leonards "Story of Stuff," she discusses how mass produced goods are distributed to consumers across the country and world. She highlights how costly the mass production phenomenon is, both because of long transportation distances and increased consumption. At Occidental I see the two most effective tactics to decrease these costs is to increase local food consumption and educate residents about reducing needless buying.

The Marketplace has already begun to buy more of their food from local distributors, but this is only a small portion of the total. One idea to help increase this would be to encourage students to write letters and/or send emails to the Marketplace staff requesting larger amounts of local food. This could be easily spearheaded by a single person by having them draft the email/letter and then distribute it to their peers. Additionally, students could make an effort to purchase more of the locally provided goods--Usually the blackboard at the front of the marketplace says what the current local goods are. Additionally, Marketplace administrators could be contacted to discuss selling food from the on campus garden at the Marketplace.

To help the students of Oxy reduce their consumption, I suggest launching an educational campaign. This campaign could discuss the high costs of consumption similarly to how The Story of Stuff does, by showing the path that goods take to get to consumer. To distribute this information, we could utilize many of the campus resources. To list a few: The Oxy Weekly, the Catalyst television show, posting flyers in dorms, etc. Residential Education could help us with this by distributing flyers through RA's and having them post them around the dorms.