Christopher Conville is the kind of guy who can tell you where everything on the plate came from. As executive chef at the Seattle Art Museum's Taste SAM cafe, he says, it's part of his job.

Take these miniburgers he's having for lunch one afternoon at the cafe. The beef is Sedro Woolley's Skagit River Ranch. The potatoes: Olsen Farms of Aladdin. And the greens come from Carnation's Full Circle Farm.

"It's so important to know," Conville says. "People have lost touch with their food. It's my responsibility to know what I'm putting in people's mouths."

As an 11-year veteran of Bon Appétit Management, the company that runs the cafe, he's learned to see food as more than something on a plate.

That's why last month, he was among 10 chefs, cooks and Seattle Culinary Academy instructors who attended a retreat for kitchen professionals at Quillisascut, a goat-cheese farm in Eastern Washington.

The five-day retreat — in which participants become short-term farmhands while hashing larger issues — aims to show just that: That food doesn't come from a bag but is the product of someone's work and wisdom.

The message is part of a bigger one promoting "sustainable food": a growing national movement marked by closer chef-farmer relationships and the purchase of local, organic and seasonal ingredients.

Participants milk goats, help make cheese and harvest edibles from gardens and nearby wilds.

Conville, 35, tall and tattooed, was among several who spilled off the main road to wade through a slushy thicket of marsh for a wealth of creek-bed watercress. "It's gonna be good eatin' tonight," he laughed in his deep voice.

The experience, he says, "confirmed that we're doing the right thing. We're contributing to the greater good."

Bon Appétit, based in Palo Alto, Calif., is an industry leader in terms of pursuing sustainability. Its slogan is "Food for a Sustainable Future"; its accounts at SAM, Nordstrom and Cancer Care Alliance are among its nearly 200 corporate-, college- and museum-food operations nationwide.

For Conville — whose staff ranges from seven to 27 depending on the season — fulfilling the company's mission means buying local; 90 percent of the cafe's produce comes from Carnation's Full Circle Farm. And because citrus doesn't grow locally, the cafe instead uses verjuice pressed from unripened grapes for acidic cooking purposes.

A 150-mile radius

Thinking locally means "knowing what you can't get here, and realizing what you can," says cafe general manager Danielle Custer, and then capitalizing on flavors and panache. The cafe has a brochure listing its vendors, or what it calls "our partners in sustainability," readily available to customers.

Last month, the company challenged its chefs on a selected day to feature at least one menu item made entirely with ingredients produced within 150 miles.

Conville says that was even harder than it sounds: Some dishes had to be disqualified because although bread was baked within the specified range, the grains used came from Idaho or Montana.

Conville decided his most doable dish would be the Lummi Island Salmon Frittata. "I was really worried about Lummi Island," he says. "We had to call and see how far they were." (The island is 109 miles from Seattle.)

Still, to fit the criteria, the dish would require one change on that date — using Beecher's Flagship cheddar instead of Quillisascut cheese. (Quillisascut is about 300 miles away in Rice, Stevens County.) First, Conville had to verify that Beecher's cows themselves were within 150 miles.

Followed dad's example

Conville's parents split up when he was young. He got into the restaurant business when he was 10, shredding cheese or washing cookware at the mom-and-pop place where his father worked in the ski resort of Park City, Utah.

With his dad working three jobs, he and his brother learned to take care of themselves. Conville took to cooking, occasionally trying to duplicate his dad's standout spaghetti sauce without success. "I was just experimenting," he says. "There was no pressure. But whatever it was, we had to eat it. There just wasn't a lot around."

By the time he was 18, he knew it was what he wanted to do. "I never went to school," he says. "This is what I'm comfortable at." Eventually, he moved to Oregon and knew he'd found a home when, for his first interview with Bon Appétit, he was asked to bring his knives.

He quickly moved from lead dinner cook to sous chef to executive chef, moving to Washington three years ago to run the kitchen at The Evergreen State College, where sustainability really sunk in for him. "They actually have a farm there," he says. "We were sitting down with the farmers to plan the next year's menu."

The Quillisascut retreat reminded him that as much as he's already accomplishing with Bon Appétit, there's room for improvement.

He says he'll focus on replicating the types of relationships he had with Evergreen's farmers, collaborating to plan out the next year's menu. Another challenge: trying to figure out ways to use surplus farm items.

"A lot of stuff is grown and gets rototilled back into the earth," he says. Canning some of those foods might be one new strategy. "That'd be cool," he says, already excited about the idea. "Our own canned whatever. I think people would get into that."

He likes that his cooks perk up when something new is in season, as if adding another color to their palette. Conville hopes that passion can transfer to their customers through the food.

Marc Ramirez: 206-464-8102 or mramirez@seattletimes.com