An End to House Dining

The recent outbreak of stomach sickness among Dunster and Mather House residents serves as an important reminder of how dependent we undergraduates are on Harvard University Dining Services (HUDS) for our daily meals. Complain though we may about the hokey table tent slogans and the persistent tri-weekly presence on our dinner menu of such culinary atrocities as General Wong’s Chicken, habit and our mandatory $3,792 a year unlimited meal plan continue to drive us day after day into the hallowed halls of HUDS. Yet House dining in its present form is costly, inefficient, restrictive to our freedom of choice and supportive of food waste and poor nutrition. And it is for these reasons that HUDS should end its mandatory meal plan and close many of the House dining halls.

Let me first address the two main arguments offered in favor of House dining. Many would suggest that individual dining halls are an essential feature of House life; that dining daily in the company of neighbors and tutors is one of the hallmarks of the Harvard experience. This is all well and good, but I fail to see how this would become any less possible if, say, all the residents of Leverett, Dunster and Mather House were lumped into a single dining hall. You could still eat with all of the people you do now; it’s just that you would also have more flexibility to eat in Harvard Square, Loker Commons or Annenberg as your schedule and taste or cost preferences dictated. If some students chose to spend less time with their housemates, it would be their right to do so, just as it is now.

The other, stronger argument in favor of House dining is that it is extremely convenient. But Leverett Towers residents are about the same distance from their own dining hall as they are from Dunster or Mather House’s. Eliot and Kirkland House dining halls are already connected (if not yet in a student-accessible way), Lowell and Winthrop House residents can practically throw spoons at each other between their dining halls, and many Cabot House residents can stare out their windows into those of Pforzheimer House’s dining hall. Forcing everyone to trek to a single central dining hall like Annenberg might cause problems, but concentrating dining service into three or four strategic locations would scarcely have any impact on our daily lives. And any convenience lost at dinner would be gained back at lunch, as the end of inter-house restrictions and the flexibility of variable meal plans would allow us to eat much closer to campus than most of us can now.

There are a lot of other benefits to ending House dining. For one thing, costs would be reduced. As the Handbook for Students states, a large portion of the present Board fee is due to the fixed costs of operating 12 separate House dining halls. A reduction in meal plan costs and the wide array of other options available would make a Harvard education cheaper for all of us. That’s another blow to the convenience argument right there: a 50-hour reduction in one’s Dorm Crew sentence makes up for an awful lot of five minute dinner treks.

Variable meal plans would also do a great deal to combat the ever-present problem of wasted food. At present, our unlimited meal plan tends to grossly exaggerate the amount of food we actually take; when all your food is free, there’s no reason not to pile twice as much on to your tray as you actually want in order to avoid having to go back for more later, and thus we needlessly throw away tons of perfectly edible food. A meal plan with per-item prices would greatly reduce the incentive to waste food as we do now. Plus, itemizing each thing we eat tends to make us more aware of what exactly we’re eating; you feel less inclined to take that extra brownie or ice cream sundae when you have to consciously think about ordering and paying for it.

But the most important reason of all to eliminate House dining is also the most obvious: with variable meal plans, we would no longer have any incentive to eat in a dining hall when the daily menu doesn’t appeal to us. There are both physical and psychological benefits to having a good, fulfilling lunch and dinner every day; a tasty meal can do wonders for one’s mood. And although Harvard Square already has a decent number of moderately-priced restaurants, unleashing thousands of hungry undergraduates would create new demand for cheap, college-friendly joints; in addition to adding to the array of dining options for all local residents, this new market could be a powerful force against the present gentrification of the Square. Instead of cellular phone stores and expensive fashion boutiques, we could have half a dozen new Tommy’s. The resulting changes to zoning and property values might even compel other student-friendly business to migrate from Central Square to more convenient locations here.

Freeing us from mandatory meal plans and House dining could greatly improve the quality of student life at very little cost to anyone. As Harvard’s planners contemplate the future of campus life, the elimination of this inefficient and outdated restriction on our daily habits is an option well worth considering.

Michael C. Love ’04 is an engineering sciences concentrator in Dunster House.