Chopped bell peppers on cutting board

Around here, eating your veggies is a privilege, not a chore.

At Five Four One in McNary Dining Center, produce lines the counter: a rainbow of flavor and color that students can choose to have baked onto a pizza, stirred into house-made pasta, or served atop a nourishing grain bowl.

Much of that produce comes from local farms. Five Four One's reliance on local ingredients is what gives the restaurant its name: Five Four One is the local telephone area code for the Corvallis area. On any given day, herbs from the campus vegetable garden, bell peppers from Albany, mushrooms from the Yamhill Valley, and potatoes from Klamath County may be on the menu. Some of them are even grown by a fellow Beaver.

Jamie Kitzrow is now the owner of Spring Hill Organic Farm in Albany, along with his wife Lisa Schwartz. But back in 1990, he was a student at Oregon State. He intended to pursue a career in forestry, but an internship in horticulture caught his eye, and his life changed forever.

“I fell in love with vegetables and switched career paths,” he said. He now farms 43 acres of organic crops on a farm just 12 miles from Oregon State’s Corvallis campus.

Watch our video and follow the path of Jamie’s organic peppers, from his farm to Organically Grown, a produce co-operative that sources from farms all over Oregon, to the dining center table.