Faculty Spotlight: Dr. Taylor Reid

Insights Into Sustainable Practices from a CIA Professor

Author Madeleine White ’29 is a Food Business Management major.

I had the utmost privilege of taking Dr. Taylor Reid’s course Introduction to Food Systems which changed my perspective of the food industry. Dr. Reid grew up and went to college in Massachusetts, where he met a professor who shaped his passions for sustainability, “I walked into my first biology class and thought, ‘oh boy this guy’s going to be boring’ then five minutes into class, chalk was flying everywhere. He was really inspiring! He was a botanist and really instilled this love of plants in me, which was a bit of a surprise since my dad was also a botanist. I didn’t get the love genetically; I got it from an inspiring professor.” Dr. Reid held many positions prior to joining CIA in 2018, since then he has created courses to help immerse students in sustainability and create lifelong passion in them as well. I sat down with him to ask a few questions about his time here at CIA.

Why did you choose to go into your profession here at CIA? Where did this passion come from?

I worked in an industry with natural products, working with farmers. Applying products that were less environmentally toxic, then I realized I didn’t just want to be less toxic; I wanted to change the food system. My two goals are to try to increase biodiversity and offset my own climate footprint. I am a scientist; I spend a lot of time looking at what is happening. There are a lot of challenges in the world today and we can be overwhelmed and frustrated, or we can try to build a meaningful life in a world that is imperfect. We need to find a way to practice our principles and values with whatever resources we have now. All of us make decisions every day that are impactful, and the key is just being intentional about those decisions and not trying to be perfect. We are human. I find a lot of joy in the process of trying to live more authentically every day.

How does the study of food systems affect hospitality workers and those in the culinary industry?

One of the ways that I talk about this in my classroom is that food is a system and it only functions because of the connections between its different parts whether that is within a restaurant or a hotel. I kind of think of a restaurant kitchen as being like an island in a stream. And so, the way to be successful in the restaurant kitchen is to understand what’s going on upstream. So, you can tell a complete story and to be intentional about your effects on what happens downstream. So that you can build trust in your community and with your customers. And that takes work because we’re so busy on the island itself, it’s really hard to look upstream and downstream. But we have an opportunity to do that in college. And so that’s the intent of my courses—to help my students to have a better island by learning to look upstream and downstream. What impacts us in the hospitality industry and what impact do we have on the rest of the world?

As one of your students I can vouch for the effectiveness of your projects like taking students foraging or creating our own menus. What makes those projects so effective for students?

A project like that effectively I feel like it’s important to know why? Why is it useful and why it’s difficult sometimes as a teacher to balance those opportunities. But I really have found that, you know, we’re at a place where students really thrive with project-based hands-on learning. And so, I really try to incorporate as much of that as possible into the classroom. And I agree. That’s where I see my students really coming into themselves and learning the best is when they’re engaged in those hands-on activities.

What is the most valuable takeaway you gained while learning about food systems?

The only real way to sustainability is to build a system that mimics natural ecologies. They have the kind of diversity and balance that helps them take care of themselves; they have to. They don’t have anyone, nobody’s tending to them in nature. So, they find a balance through diversity and through, you know, mutualism through the beneficial interactions between living organisms. I want to do that, but I also want the space to produce lots of different kinds of food. It’s an experiment. The goal is to produce as much food for my family and my community as possible with as few inputs, including my own labor as possible. And every year I seem to make progress toward that goal.

What does the food system look like in your personal life?

I farm in my free time with 30 different kinds of fruits and nuts; I raise pigs and goats. I am really trying to diversify the land and manage it in a way that is biodiverse and stores carbon in the soil. To connect the garden to the home and to make the farm more integrated with the way we spend our lives. Another thing that I do is try not to buy too much feed for the animals, so I select breeds that are good grazers. It’s really important, but I also have community relationships with which I get sent grain from CIA’s brewery. I get excess milk from a raw milk dairy down the road and then I go Saturday to the local supermarket where they give me all of their excess produce. For feeding the pigs and so I think of it as sort of, you know, that the home system, but also a community system as well.

What do you hope students take away from your class, and what advice would you give to incoming students interested in learning more about food systems?

There are failures and successes in every cycle of things and so it’s important not to get discouraged by failures and to be able to have a long horizon and to learn from them. Success is something that happens over a long period of time. And so, you know, those are the kinds of things that I’m trying to integrate into my class.