Local challenge

For one day, cafeterias create meals from foods produced close by

When faced with his first Eat Local Challenge, Patrick Weinberg "didn't go over the edge," he admits. "We didn't turn our Coke machines off or anything," says Weinberg, general manager of the main dining hall on Duke University's East Campus.

But for months before the recent event, Weinberg did scramble to find items such as locally raised beef and hormone-free milk.

The results? As students streamed in for the start of lunch, past tables decorated with piles of sweet potatoes and squash and Eat Local posters and brochures, they could choose a meal created completely from ingredients within 150 miles of campus. (If they skipped the Coke, that is.)

With menu items such as Braised Grass-fed Sirloin Tips, from Harris Acres Farms in Pinetops, Weinberg and the managers of two corporate cafeterias in the Triangle were responding to a challenge set by their bosses at Bon Appetit Management Co. in Palo Alto, Calif.

Bon Appetit, which operates 400 cafes in 29 states, has set some unusually high standards for itself regarding nutrition and agricultural sustainability. For example, its fryers use only nonhydrogenated canola oil; its deli meats are made from turkey and beef roasted in-house; and its soups, stocks and sauces are made from scratch. Its Circle of Responsibility initiatives include commitments to buy local foods, sustainable seafood and antibiotic-free meats.

Last year Bon Appetit raised the bar again, with the Eat Local Challenge -- a day on which its chefs are encouraged to prepare meals using only ingredients from within 150 miles of their cafe. The first Eat Local day was in September 2005, with 190 chefs participating.

At Cisco Systems, Oct. 3 was the second Eat Local Challenge for Rick Backstrom, general manager of dining services. In addition to changes in the menu, Backstrom also offered employees a farmers market in the main dining area, with local producers of everything from prawns to hot sauce.

"I learned a lot from last year," says Backstrom, who oversees three cafeterias at Cisco in Morrisville, which serve about 1,000 people a day total.

Backstrom first began surfing for information on local farms on the Web. But he found greater success with personal interaction. "All you have to do is ask," he says. "If you're looking for a local butter maker, ask a farmer and he'll say, 'Well, so and so has really good butter.' "

Finding the butter and cream produced by Jackson Dairy came in handy when Backstrom struck out on finding another key ingredient. "I couldn't find a local oil, so we used local butter to do the vegetables," he says.

At the height of lunchtime on Eat Local day, employees have many options to choose from in Cisco's main cafeteria. One of the stations, called At Home, is 100 percent local. It features a soup made from local organic sweet potatoes and a surf-and-turf special of the farm-raised prawns and local beef. Thanks to hydroponic lettuces from 3L Farms in Durham, his salad bar is about 80 percent local. One of Backstrom's chefs had a fig tree in his backyard, so he made a fig pudding for dessert.

Meanwhile, a few minutes away, lunch is winding down at Tekelek, another high-tech company in Morrisville with a Bon Appetit cafeteria. The Lilac and Ghostbuster Eggplant Omelet was a hit with breakfast customers, and so were his lunch options, Charolais Beef Blueberry Barbecue with field peas and cornbread and Summer Peach, Wild Berry and Goat Cheese Salad with fingerling potatoes.

"We sold out of most of the local stuff," says chef manager Amine Bellaj. He adds that local lettuce was the hardest item to find.

Late lunch customers linger at the tables set up in the dining area by two of Bellaj's suppliers, Bee Blessed Honey and In the Red Farm, sampling honey and goat cheese. The chef said he thought most employees wouldn't be bothered with buying perishable produce at work. "But with the honey and the goat cheese, they can put them in their desks."

Raspberries in summer

In this age of globalization, some may wonder why Bon Appetit is pushing its employees to think local. "It can be hard to understand why we shouldn't eat raspberries in the winter," Bon Appetit CEO Fedele Bauccio is quoted in a news release. "But we hope that when our guests taste foods at the peak of ripeness, produce that has been harvested nearby within days, or even hours, maybe it will click: This is how food is meant to taste."

The experience was certainly an eye-opener for Michael Aquaro, executive chef at the Duke University dining hall on East Campus. "It was really exciting to see how much we could get within the state of North Carolina," he says.