Food: What's Cooking On Campus

Locally grown food is the latest student cause. Can this movement save family farmers?

They shut down the Pepsi machines in the University of Portland cafeteria the other day. The plastic bottles of Hunt's Ketchup disappeared. Sugar was replaced with honey from a neighborhood beekeeper. And everything else on the lunch menu, from soup (lentil) to nuts (hazel), was locally grown, baked, milked and mixed. The shrimp was harvested in nearby Netarts Bay, not in Thailand; the herbs were gathered in adjacent Clackamas County, not in California; the chicken was pastured on fields outside Eugene, not imported from the Midwest's vast factory farms. "It's awesome," said Alex Samuels, 19, a freshman from Puyallup, Wash., swigging...

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