Televisions Light Up Dining Experience

Dining halls are now serving up nutrition information on a high-tech array of glowing flat-screen monitors that cost them thousands of dollars.

Harvard University Dining Services (HUDS) installed 13 42-inch flat-panel plasma television monitors and 14 free-standing electronic kiosks into the 13 dining halls across campus last summer.

But after more than two months, only four screens and five kiosks have been activated, while at the nine river Houses, the screens and kiosks remain black.

According to HUDS Director of Marketing and Communications Crista Martin, the new screens and kiosks will keep students informed about the food in the dining halls.

“People are interested in where their food comes from, and this is a great way for us to be able to share that as things quickly change” Martin said.

HUDS had initially agreed to release the cost of the new technology but ultimately refused to give the figure, citing contract obligations.

According to a Best Buy spokeswoman, however, the 42-inch plasma screens bought by HUDS typically retail at $2,599.95.

At that price, the 13 screens would have cost a total of $33,799.35. It is unclear how much HUDS paid for the kiosks, but most Web sites list models starting at $3,000—a total of at least $42,000. Martin said that the new screens and kiosks were financed from the HUDS reserves’ budget—the profits from its retail operations, such as the Greenhouse Cafe—and not from students’ board fees.

Last year, HUDS officials said that the board fees, which pay for food and the operation of the dining halls, did not provide enough funding to extend dining hall hours—a move long advocated by the Undergraduate Council.

In the Quad dining halls and Annenberg, the four screens flash different slides with facts about HUDS. One such slide advertises that all dining hall food is trans-fat free, while another asks students to reduce their napkin use.

According to Martin, the kiosks—when fully operational—will allow students to order bagged meals and check menus from the dining hall, services that are already available on the HUDS Web site.

Quad residents, however, say that the screens and kiosks have not changed their dining experience.

Nora C. Barr ’10, a resident of Pforzheimer house, said she used the new kiosk only once to order a meal because “I realized I could just do it from my room.”

Geoff C. Rathgeber ’08 said that the new screens might be more interesting to students if they served a different function.

“It just seems like a better opportunity to play CNN or ESPN rather than HUDS ads,” he said.

—Margot E. Edelman can be reached at medelman@fas.harvard.edu.