AMHERST, Mass. — For Hampshire College students involved in the Local Food Challenge, there are no stops for a late night burrito. Chicken wings downtown? They're out, too. Never mind stocking up on soda. Even bananas are out of the loop.

As the name implies, the Local Food Challenge is about eating only things grown or produced close enough to know exactly where they're coming from.

"We have a Local Foods Initiative here, that's been around about five or six years, so a lot of students are eating locally. But the next step was to do a challenge," said Tobin Porter-Brown. "We wanted to determine what it would mean, what we would have to do, to only eat local."

During spring semester last year, Porter-Brown and nine other Hampshire students collaborated in an independent study with environmental microbiology professor Jason Tor to figure out whether there was a wide enough assortment of food grown within a 150-mile radius of the Hampshire College campus to provide them with the basis of a healthy diet, without having to go broke paying for it. The answer surprised even them.

"It's incredible what can be produced in the [Pioneer] Valley," said Porter-Brown. "At the end of the study, we had a list of all the producers we could get things from."

The game plan successfully designed, Porter-Brown, Malaika Mara Spencer, Justin Mest, Noah Kellerman, and Emily Ryan dove into the challenge at the start of this school year. Like many of Hampshire's older students, they live in apartment-style residential areas called "mods." Students sharing a mod may do all their cooking and food buying individually or as a group, so it's been relatively easy to collaborate on meals and food pickup.

The cost of eating local so far has averaged out at about $25 a week, and that includes stocking up on supplies for the winter. They have about 500 pounds of wheat berries stored at a nearby farm, and they use that to make their own flour on a bicycle-powered mill stored in their mod's living room. Summer fruits have been dried, boxes of tomatoes turned into sauce, sunflower seeds harvested for oil that will be ground out in a homemade press. Honey and maple syrup have taken the place of cane sugar, and the students are learning how to make everything from muffins to pizza with localized variations on typical recipes.

"There are some really wonderful ingredients, and we're being creative with them. So many things can be done with what we have," said Ryan.

While the environmentally-conscious students will try to subsist completely on local food this semester (with excused breaks whenever they happen to be out of town), next semester they'll also be frequenting restaurants that are doing their part to support local farmers and producers.