Elissa Biondi makes a point to attend the Locally Grown Lunch held at Chatham College.

"I think it's nice to support the local growers, and I think the food tastes fresher than usual," said Biondi, a senior studying Spanish at the college in Squirrel Hill.

She knew that some of the food she ate at the lunch last Thursday came from farms not too far from her McCandless home, but she didn't know that one of those farms was Brenckle's Farms and Greenhouses in Reserve.

"I know Brenckle's!" she said. "I think that Chatham tries to be [environmentally aware]. ... We're lucky that we got to experience that."

This is the second year that Parkhurst Dining Services, the college's meal service, hosted the lunch for students and staff in the college cafeteria. The company dishes out the local food as part its farm source initiative, an effort to have 20 percent of the food it buys come from local farmers, growers' cooperatives and producers. Parkhurst is a division of the Eat'n Park Hospitality Group.

For the Locally Grown Lunch, the menu featured corn on the cob, hydroponic bib lettuce and entrees made with heirloom tomatoes, squash and cauliflower, all from Butler County. The BLT contained bacon from Bucks County and lettuce and tomatoes from Butler County. The roast pork loin also came from Bucks County.

The vegetables came from Brenckle's, Harvest Valley Farms in Middlesex and Cool Spring Organics in Forward, said Leslie Ekstrand, general manager of Parkhurst Dining Services.

The company buys all of its dairy products from Western Pennsylvania, doing business with Turner Dairy Farm in Penn Hills and buying ice cream from Reinhold's Ice Cream on the North Side. All of the honey that Parkhurst buys is local, with some of it coming from a beekeeper in Ross, Ekstrand said.

"It's important to support the local economy and the small grower," she said.

Plus, she said, locally grown food typically has better flavor because of the shorter distance it has traveled.

She pointed out the texture of a piece of bib lettuce grown hydroponically -- in a nutrient-rich solution instead of in soil. "Hydroponic lettuce is more delicate. Bib lettuce that's grown in the ground is stiffer," she said.

Environmentalist Rachel Carson went to Chatham, and the school's "green" sensibility is a long-standing tradition.

"Parkhurst buying produce from Western Pennsylvania means there's less of a need for preservatives and pesticides. Tomatoes grown in California are picked when they're green," said Paul Kovach, vice president for communications at Chatham.

Laurel Rush, of the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture, staffed a presentation table in the dining hall and talked about Pennsylvania agriculture. The association has a Buy Fresh, Buy Local campaign that involves farms, restaurants, wholesalers and farmers markets, Rush said. "Why would you want to buy tomatoes from California when you can buy them here? You want to support your local economy as much as you can," she said.

Eat'n Park Hospitality Group buys produce through the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture, said Jamie Moore, purchasing manager for the group.

The company's Farm Source program provides a weekly list of local growers and what is in season, and the company's managers decide what produce to use based on the lists, he said.

"A lot of this goes back to transportation, cutting down on costs and supporting the local economy," he said.