As the first students amble in for lunch at Goucher College's Heubeck Dining Hall, chef Clinton Elliott promotes his daily special: tender ravioli filled with wild mushroom goat cheese from FireFly Farms Organic in Garrett County.
If Elliott's homemade pasta doesn't entice, students may choose from a cornucopia of other dishes prepared with local ingredients.
The baked chicken breasts hail from Springfield Farm in Sparks. Chestnuts from another chef's Baltimore County farm bring earthy flavor to the stuffing. The apple crisp was prepared with fruit from Eden Valley Farm, northwest of Philadelphia. The sauteed kale and roasted Yukon potatoes came from Help From Above Farm in Pennsylvania. New Morning Farm, also in Pennsylvania, supplied the green beans, served with garlic, ginger and red bell pepper strips.
"It's nice to have fresh vegetables," said sophomore Sierra Polisar as she lunched with classmates. At home in Silver Spring, meals depend on produce from her mother's garden. "I'm used to good stuff," Polisar said.
In 2003, Goucher joined the growing number of colleges and universities around the country that are rejecting industrial agriculture's domination of the food-services industry. Instead, these schools have signed on to the "localvore" movement in search of regional produce, meat and dairy products.
Farm-to-cafeteria programs have taken different forms at different institutions. In 2002, chef Alice Waters teamed with Aramark food services to launch a farm-to-cafeteria food program in her daughter's dining hall at Yale University.
An organic garden cultivated by students at Middlebury College in Vermont yields heirloom tomatoes, blueberries, beets and sweet onions sold at market price to the school's dining service.
At the Johns Hopkins University's Homewood campus, students can feast on local pears, rockfish and gelato made in Baltimore as part of the school's fledgling sustainability program. At Loyola College, 10 percent of the produce served on campus comes from local growers.
"My best guess is that there are probably close to 200 projects at colleges and universities around the country that are purchasing products from local farmers in a significant way," says Kristen Markley, a central Pennsylvania organic farmer who manages the farm-to-college program for the Community Food Security Coalition, based in Venice, Calif.
`Socially responsible'
