'Local Challenge' is a lesson

So it wasn't exactly D-day -- actually, it didn't even generate an Arbor Day-level blip -- but Oct. 3 was circled in red on the calendars in certain Minnesota kitchens. It was the annual "Eat Local Challenge" day at Bon Appetit Management Co., the catering conglomerate behind Cue at the Guthrie Theater, Cafe Minnesota at the Minnesota History Center, corporate cafeterias at Best Buy, Carlson Cos. and Target and dining halls at Macalester and St. Olaf colleges.

As contests go, the rules were a snap: With the exception of salt, all ingredients used in a meal that day could travel no farther than 150 miles from farm to plate. This is hardly a revolutionary concept. Lucia Watson of Lucia's Restaurant and Brenda Langton of Cafe Brenda and Spoonriver were pioneering practitioners of this local-is-better philosophy, and in the past decade, flocks of Twin Cities chefs and restaurateurs have followed suit.

At Bon Appetit, the Challenge isn't exactly an Alice Waters-like respite from a dreary daily drill of opening cans and thawing freezer bags. For the past seven years, the California-based company has been an industry leader in promoting -- actually, insisting upon -- farmer-chef partnerships among its 200-plus operations nationwide. So while most Bon Appetit kitchens take a business-as-usual approach to buying fresh, local ingredients, the Challenge's no-salt line in the sand can be a tall order for even the most farm-focused operations. Blame it on scale. At St. Olaf alone, Bon Appetit prepares 37,000 meals a week; the college's Challenge lunch fed 2,200.

St. Olaf executive chef Peter Abrahamson likes to view the Challenge as a learning opportunity.

"We have many relationships with local growers, and we buy locally every day," he said. "But we don't talk about it a lot. We use the Challenge to help students understand more about what we do. This is a college, so we do what we can to foster knowledge. With events like the Challenge, I think students appreciate the food service more, knowing that we're not just pulling stuff off a truck."

Challenge was a teaching tool

Steve Vranian, executive chef for Bon Appetit's dining operations at Carlson Cos. in Minnetonka, viewed the event as a training exercise inside his kitchen. "We needed sugar for braised cabbage, but since we didn't have sugar, we used apple juice instead," he said.

"That was such a learning experience for our cooks. Funny thing is, we're doing what anyone would have done a hundred years ago, when almost all food was raised locally, and when the economics of sugar made buying it impossibly expensive."

The Challenge wasn't just about eating well. Abrahamson invited farmers to the Stav Hall dining room for meet-and-greets with students and faculty members. One farm, Stogrow, didn't have a long journey. The two-year-old St. Olaf Garden Research and Organic Works is a remarkable 1½-acre farm run by a small number of students on college-owned land near campus. The students coordinate their crop plans with Bon Appetit, and the company buys the farm's entire output; this year's harvest was valued at $15,000.

In many ways, Abrahamson and his fellow institutional chefs are the ideal market for small family farms. "We have the volume, and our business is very predictable; our demands are very easy to forecast," said Abrahamson. "We write our menus every week, from scratch, so we can take advantage of whatever is available. It puts us in a position to have a favorable influence on the local farming economy."

Buying local isn't just the feel-good food movement du jour. Along with providing much-needed investment in rural communities, locally focused agriculture can have a huge impact on fuel consumption and corresponding air pollution.

U.S. food travels, on average, from 1,500 to 2,500 miles as it journeys from farmer to consumer, according to the Worldwatch Institute, a nonpartisan environmental think-tank based in Washington, D.C. That's a 25 percent increase since 1980. A 2001 Iowa State University study concluded that if Iowa farmers raised just 10 percent of that state's estimated per capita consumption of 28 varieties of fruits and vegetables, trucks would consume nearly 350,000 fewer gallons of fuel, preventing the release of almost 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And that's just Iowa.

And it tastes great, too

Here's another no-brainer: The fresher the food, the higher the level of nutrients. "And let's face it: It just tastes better," said Michael Delcambre, executive chef at Macalester College.

"When we order locally raised chickens, they're slaughtered on Monday and we're roasting them on Tuesday; they're that fresh. They haven't traveled across the country in a refrigerated rail car and sat in a warehouse."

Delcambre enlisted more than a dozen Minnesota farms for his 1,100-person Challenge lunch, which included a bison-wild rice soup made with meat from Eichten's Hidden Acres in Center City, wild rice from Indian Harvest in Bemidji and cream from Cedar Summit Farm in New Prague. The vegetables were from Hidden Stream Farm in Elgin. A cheese pizza was made using a young gouda from the PastureLand cooperative in southeastern Minnesota, its flour was from Nature's Harvest in Waseca, tomatoes and herbs from Bushel Boy Farms in Owatonna, even canola oil from Botanic Oil Innovations in Spooner, Wis.

"We could have done this 10 years ago, but quite honestly, it wouldn't have been viewed as important," said Delcambre. "Ten years ago, organics was the word of the day. While that's still important, sustainability, land stewardship and getting local farmers a decent price for their quality product is now in the spotlight."

Rick Nelson • 612-673-4757 • rdnelson@startribune.com