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Summit Spring Water, a Harrison company, is the bottled water of choice at Bates because of its environmentally friendly processing.

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Christine Schwartz, head of dining services at Bates College in Lewiston, stirs a vegetarian fricassee while Michael Landry mixes a teriyaki green bean salad. Schwartz is using income from a $2.5 million gift to increase the school’s budget for local organic food.

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Kelly Perrault, a food-services worker at Bates College in Lewiston, refills the gluten-free bagel bin in the dining hall. Bates gets its bagels from Spelt Right Bakery in Yarmouth, a company that makes its products from organic spelt flour and other all-natural ingredients. The college received an anonymous $2.5 million gift to its dining services department a few years ago but withheld the announcment until this year to coincide with the opening of its new commons.

LITTLE BITES

MICHAEL POLLAN, author of "The Omnivore's Dilemma," will give the annual Otis Lecture at Bates College at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 27 in the College Chapel on College Street. Pollan's lecture, which is free and open to the public, is titled "In Defense of Food: The Omnivore's Solution." A reception and book signing will follow.

THE ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES program at Bates will sponsor a screening of two documentary films about local food producers at 7 p.m. Oct. 29 in Room 104 of the Olin Arts Center. The films were made by students in a 2004 environmental studies course under the instruction of filmmaker Melissa Paly. Paly will attend the screening and discuss the films afterward.

If there's any doubt about just how savvy people have become about the food they put into their mouths, consider the e-mails that Christine Schwartz gets every day from students at Bates College.

Schwartz, director of dining services at the private college in Lewiston, paraphrased a query she received from a curious student one morning last week: "I love the pesto soup, but clearly the recipe is not the same as last time, and I want to know why."

"'When's the local apple cider coming in? I'm dying for it,'" Schwartz continued, reciting the requests she gets regularly. "'Can you get us enriched soy milk? We're out of the low-fat French vanilla soy yogurt.'

"And then they will send me specific labels of food they want, or farms they want food from. My life has become much more complicated."

More complicated, yes, as students' eating patterns and demands have changed. But lately Schwartz's life has gotten a little easier too. Bates announced in early September that it has received a $2.5 million gift from an anonymous donor that was to be earmarked for dining services. More specifically, the money is to be used to increase the school's budget for local organic foods.

"It's extremely rare for a dining service to get this sort of anonymous gift, because much more often, they'll give to a chair or a building or something traditionally educational in nature," Schwartz said.

The grant has been put into an endowment, and Schwartz is doing some interesting things with the investment income. The school has jumped on board with a yearlong, campuswide initiative called "Nourishing Body and Mind: Bates Contemplates Food."

Throughout the school year, food politics will be on the menu. Students will explore where their food comes from and how it gets here. Earlier this week, they heard Paul Rozin, a professor from the University of Pennsylvania, discuss the psychology of food choices. On Oct. 27, the school's annual Otis Lecture will focus on food with a talk by Michael Pollan, bestselling author of "The Omnivore's Dilemma."

On Oct. 29, the environmental studies program will sponsor a free public screening of two documentaries about local food producers.

Bates received the $2.5 million gift a couple of years ago, but waited to disclose it until this year, after the construction of its new energy-efficient dining commons was complete. The reasoning was that the gift might detract attention from the capital improvement project.

Bates is one of several Maine colleges that have already gained national reputations for their food. It made the top 20 list for "Best Campus Food" in the "Princeton Review's Best 368 Colleges 2009," which ranks colleges using student reviews. Other Maine schools making the list were Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Colby College in Waterville and College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor.

These schools are perennial favorites on those lists, partly because of their emphasis on serving local, organic foods. With the $2.5 million gift in hand, Bates has been able to expand its offerings in this area. Local and organic foods now make up a bigger slice of the food-budget pie, growing from 22 percent to 28 percent. Schwartz's goal is to make it 30 percent.

Bates now buys grass-fed beef from Cold Spring Ranch in New Portland, the same farm that provides Primo, Fore Street, Back Bay Grill and other well-known Maine restaurants with locally raised meat. Its bagels come from Spelt Right Bakery in Yarmouth, a company that makes its products from organic spelt flour and other all-natural ingredients.

Another change was in bottled water, a hot topic these days as the public debates the environmental impact of taking water out of aquifers and trucking it around in millions of plastic bottles that end up in landfills.

Bates easily goes through 4,200 cases of bottled water a year for catered and special events. That's more than...