The Food Problem: I The Central Kitchen

The problem of food at a college which has most students in residence is inevitably a stormy one. Even staid Harvard has lived through food riots, and occasional attacks of food poisoning, resulting in wide-spread student reaction. Yet, the violence of undergraduate feeling is tremendous. It is far greater than it would be if a food poisoning out-break were the sole cause. The average attitude of most men toward the Dining Hall offerings has always been somewhat hostile. So students, when presented with definite evidence of bungling, make the most of it with denunciations and action.

The degree of annoyance over food varies from House to House. Adams and Dunster are the only Houses with separate kitchens, and this is the basic reason for their comparative excellence. If we may judge from the higher percentage of meals eaten per resident, and the eternal struggle to eat there under the Inter-House quota, Adams serves the finest University food.

The Kirkland central kitchen is over-centralized, not from the point of view of cold monetary efficiency, but simply from judging the finished meals as lunches or dinners. The number of meals produced per employee is greater in the central kitchen, and the flavor and quality of these meals is definitely inferior. Dispensing meals can never be like building automobiles or libraries, because it is the little extras which spell the difference between good and poor meals. Dishes which have been salted with a shaker always seem tastier than ones in which a pre-determined amount has been dumped and stirred around with an car. Lugging vats of meat and vegetables through stifling steam tunnels to House Dining Halls necessarily renders most food tasteless.

Even if the Adams House Dining Hall does hire half a dozen more employees than the College average, a slight drop in efficiency is certainly worth the great rise in meal quality.

It would be very simple to blame all the food difficulties on the impersonal gargantuanism of the central kitchen, but such a simplification is unwarranted. Even in the best House Dining Halls, the food is not good, though the students are not driven to complaints by its inadequacies. In addition, the University has sunk hundreds of thousands of dollars in the central kitchen and now cannot be expected blithely to abandon it as a poor idea. The quality of Dining Hall food in the five Houses attached to the central kitchen does not require poor meals. It may never rise to Locke Obercan heights, but like University food everywhere, it may definitely be improved.