The University of Colorado’s dining services landing on a national list of the most sustainable, well-sourced eateries is validation to Paul Houle that campus dining is not what it used to be.

“Students’ palates are changing,” said Houle, director of Campus Dining Services at CU. “Buying local is important, but it’s more than that.”

The Good Food 100 list compiles self-reported but independently-verified purchasing data of restaurants across the country to see where these establishments’ food is coming from. In a foodie haven like Boulder, it makes sense 13 establishments across the county are represented on the list. But even more impressive: only two universities in the U.S. made the cut.

Massachusetts’ Smith College, a private liberal arts college, was also recognized.

Houle is pleased scanning the Good Food lineup and seeing notable restaurants — Frasca, The Kitchen, Salt, Snooze — next to his campus dining service.

“We’re in great company,” he said. “We look at the restaurants that are on there, and it speaks to the fact that college dining is being regarded as good dining — food people want. We just serve maybe a little more people.”

To get on the list, CU officials took about a month to go back through its records and find the source of the campus’s food ingredients. Then, they categorized whether it was local, regional or nationally sourced.

“It’s about making sure we’re purchasing items to the best of our abilities from people who are doing better agriculture practices,” Houle said.

When CU buys ingredients, it takes into consideration factors like carbon sequestration, whether the food is organic, or if its growing process was intrusive on the land.

“If we can find someone doing aquaculture or aquaponics and growing a better tomato that way, those are things we look at,” he said. “Local is great, and we always look to source from local, but it becomes difficult at our volume sometimes.”

Feeding the entire population of CU’s residence halls presents challenges when it comes to choosing sustainable ingredients, but Houle welcomes the feat.

“We look at it as an opportunity,” he said.

Maybe CU can’t always get its shopping list locally grown, but the dining operation focuses on how it can highlight local fixings in its dishes. Maybe it works more closely with farmers, who can plant some more tomatoes so the university can make its own tomato sauce and freeze it to last through off-seasons.

Whereas a more high-brow establishment might want the most stunning tomato, CU puts flavor and sustainability over appearance.

“It doesn’t have to be the prettiest because we’re probably going to chop it up to make salsa, anyway,” Houle said.

Looking beyond the landlocked state, seafood procurement was a big win for CU, which recently made sure its fish products were on the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s ” best choices” and “good alternatives” recommendations, cutting out anything on the “avoid” list.

“When we make our fish tacos, we want to be able to say why we’re using the Acadian redfish and not the standard fish like cod because it’s being overfished,” Houle said.

The desire to know a meal’s origin story is not just Houle’s own fanaticism. It’s largely student-driven, he said.

“We get quite a few phone calls from students,” he said. “They want to know where their food is coming from. It’s not just an afterthought. People are really conscious about what their putting in their bodies.”

Elizabeth Hernandez: 303-473-1106, hernandeze@dailycamera.com, twitter.com/ehernandez