
Bon Appetit Management Company, a company that provides food service and catering for corporations and universities has a founding mission to promote social responsibility and ethical food sourcing. Today they ran their second annual Eat Local Challenge, which called for corporate and collegiate chefs to do one day's lunch menu with 100% local ingredients, sourced within 150 miles (salt being their single exception).
That means to make a sandwich, the chef not only has to find a local baker (or make the bread him/herself), the wheat has to be grown locally, the yeast must be local, etc. Then, if they want to use mayo, they've got to find local eggs and oil. You get the picture...Bon Appetit at Duke University is serving local mahi mahi...Chef Ingrid Rohrer from Cisco Systems in San Jose, CA drove out to Marin Sun Farms to pick up some of Dave Evans' grass fed beef.
Their blog features a list of menus from various participating cafeterias. If my college dorm had served food like this, I'd have been left with nothing to complain about.
Check out these awesome Canadians who did a year's worth of only eating food grown and produced within a 100 mile radius of their Vancouver home. Pretty incredible task! (check out their blog 100milediet.org)