The 7 Healthiest College Dining Halls

Laugh about Vermont’s hippie rep all you want, but our friends in the Green Mountain State are onto something. Sterling College doesn’t have any food courts or fast food joints on campus. Instead, it manages its food system from seed to compost. All students have to put in one week of dish duty each semester (trust us, your twentysomething, studio-apartment-dwelling self will be grateful), and students roll up their sleeves in the kitchen next to pro chefs to make recipes with produce from local farms.
Sterling’s Rian Fried Center for Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems houses more than 130 acres of farm and gardens, an edible forest garden, the Alfond Draft Horse Barn, hoop houses, and a sugarhouse and sugarbush for maple syrup production (it is, after all, Vermont). The college grows 35 percent of its own food using no pesticides or chemical fertilizers. Even cooler? Sterling sources 53% of their grub locally, either from large farms within a 150-mile radius or from small farms within 250 miles. Non-profit The Real Food Challenge, a nationwide initiative to make campus food more local, healthful, and sustainable has rated Sterling as #1 in America three years in a row. Those hungry for more can enroll in the School of the New American Farmstead, Sterling’s continuing education program, and take classes like Fundamentals of Artisan Cheese, Wildcrafting: Food & Beverages from the Natural World, Artisan Breadmaking & Heritage Grains, and the Art of Fermentation.

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