Anyone at JTS or YU willing to man the “eat local” barricades?

Salon has a story about the local dining movement popping up on college campuses.

Georgetown’s Eat Local Challenge — and the temporary disappearance of Taco Tuesday — was the brainchild of the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Bon Appétit Management Co. With a national staff of 10,000 and annual revenues of $400 million, BAMCO runs 300 cafes in colleges like Georgetown Law, at the corporate campuses of Oracle and Yahoo, and at other posh locations including the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and the Getty Villa in Malibu, Calif. Yes, that’s cafes, not cafeterias, as BAMCO’s director of communications, Maisie Ganzler, is quick to stress. “Cafeteria” conjures up images of can openers, frozen veggies and great quantities of mystery meat. But BAMCO believes even lowly college mess halls can be brought into the culinary vanguard.

BAMCO is not alone. In the past year, the “local” ethos has overtaken even organics as the gourmet cause célèbre — And eat-local challenges have begun sprouting up all over the place…

Large food service providers like Sodexho and Aramark, having already introduced organic products, are now experimenting with local sourcing. At Yale, Stanford, Berkeley and other universities, students can eat meals prepared with fresh local produce grown on or just off campus.

The eat-local movement owes no small measure of its success to recent exposés of the organic industry. As huge corporate farms have moved into the sector, the media has been abuzz with the transformation of organics into business as usual — with Whole Foods catering to the upscale consumer and Wal-Mart aiming for the fat middle demographic. The question is: will big business’s discovery of “local” food eventually undercut the positive effects the movement may have on the environment, small farmers and taste? Advocates of eating local say no. Their singular hope is to foment a revolution that starts on the farm and ends on our plates.

[Salon]