Harvest time in Ohio—the squash, the corn, the apples, the shrimp.

Yes, shrimp. In fact, it is shrimp harvest time at Calala’s Water Haven in New London, Ohio and because of that students at Case Western Reserve University dining halls will dine on locally-raised shrimp tonight.

“It’s a unique item,” explains Dan Farrell, resident district manager of Bon Appetit (Case’s food service provider) who drove with his staff to pick up the 650 lbs of shrimp this past weekend.

“They taste fantastic. They are fed a vegetarian diet. They look great, so we will end up displaying them in the cases and in the end we will use everything…even the heads for stock.”

If you are keeping score of surprising things you just read—there is shrimp raised in Ohio and a college cafeteria that makes stock from scratch.

Here’s another, come October 3rd, four Bon Appetit Case campus eateries will provide entire meals with ingredients that come from 150 miles away or less (not including salt).

Joining other Northeast Ohioans in this year’s Eat Local Challenge, Case and Bon Appetit will include a local roast pork, braised in Ohio apple cider, to the menu for the day.

If that sounds better than what you ate in college, that’s because it is—in every way. Bon Appetit’s guiding mission is to provide, “food service for a sustainable future” and that includes participating in the 2006 Eat Local Challenge, reviving endangered foods programs (RAFT) and reducing or eliminating trans-fat on college campuses.

Beyond the programs, Case’s student dining halls, under the direction of Chef Delmar Crim, follow a daily farm-to-fork strategy that includes: local Amish butter and chickens, real maple syrup, local honey, cage-free eggs, organic milk, fair-trade coffee, tomatoes from Pennsylvania (rather than California), and sausage, soup stock, hot chocolate, baked goods and salad dressing all made on site with quality ingredients.

With 3,500 of some sort of meal plan and two student cafeteria locations, Crim doesn’t make his work any easier by not having a deep fryer on site and not serving the collegiate favorite chicken fingers, but he readily accepts the challenge.

“There’s a lot to be done out there in the way of educating people about food,” he explains. “But I feel good about what we are feeding the students.”

And as far as the big cost question goes, Crim is adamant that more he spends on quality the less he loses to waste both in and out of the kitchen.

“We measure everything—like with pizza cheese—it is all weighed out, we don’t just pile it on,” says Crim. “But if you respect the food, so will the students. If you look at the plates of the students they are not just piling on the food and then throwing it away—there is less waste when the food is high quality.”