BY AMELIA POSSANZA

In print | Published November 13, 2008

Sharples and Tarble are common nouns in the Swarthmore student vernacular that can be easily used as meeting locations or the subjects of a complaint. But few students truly know what sort of work makes these dining institutions run, both on a day-to-day basis and in the long-term. Last Thursday, Student Council hosted the Dining Services Panel to allow members of the community to learn about and inquire into the quotidian details of Dining Services and provide input for future changes. The panel featured Dining Services Director Linda McDougall, Vice President of Facilities Stu Hain and Dean of Students Jim Larimore, and StuCo Appointments Chair Nate Erskine ’10 served as moderator. Roughly 20 students, including Student Council members and reporters, attended the meeting.

The panelists initially fielded Erskine’s questions about the basic decisions that Dining Services administrators make. Erskine first asked how the board money students pay each year as part of their college fee is spent. Responding to the question, Hain explained that a variety of costs must be covered each year in order to keep the dining hall and snack bars running: food costs, staff salaries, utilities, maintenance, air conditioning and administration. He then estimated that only about 30 percent of board fees goes to food; another 30 percent goes to staff salaries and the remainder covers administrative and physical maintenance costs. Each year, an average of $15,000 goes to replacing “missing” dishware and flatware.

Next, Erskine asked the panel to lead the students through the process they picked to choose the food that goes on the menu each day. Although staff expertise and food costs do go into consideration, the largest factors are student input and student responses. “We can look at what’s popular and not popular,” McDougall said, citing the fact that on Pasta Bar nights, students go through somewhere between 110 and 120 pounds of pasta, while on other evenings there are lots of leftovers.

The panelists briefly addressed the scare that happened last year when Dining Services considered eliminating packaged goods from Essie Mae’s snack bar. This option went into deliberation not only because of the cost of packaged goods, but also due to the storage problem they created.

“[Augustine Ruhri] had a really nice office and now it’s a storage room,” McDougall said. Although Essie Mae’s offers a diminishing variety of packaged goods, they have not yet been eliminated altogether. The panel members avoided mentioning whether the switch to this previously proposed change would take place in the near future, but they continued to stress that student input was the driving force behind their decisions. A change would not take place without first taking into consideration student voices.

But some factors must be taken as a given. Is the college going to build another dining hall any time soon? Not likely. “We’ve considered the dining hall a center for community,” Larimore said.
Some students attended the panel to learn more about the inner workings of Dining Services. “I’m interested in learning more about why Dining Services works the way it does and starting a dialogue about making reasonable changes,” Becky Wright ’11 said.

However, three out of the four students who asked questions during the panel were concerned specifically with sustainability, and asked questions related to environmentally responsible consumption rather than changes to food options.

Both Eric Brown ’09 and Elizabeth Crampton ’09 asked about the Styrofoam products that can be found in both Tarble and Sharples. The panelists defended their decision to use these products and made small concessions. Ruhri, the head of Essie Mae’s, said that the cups in the snack bar are the most biodegradable low-cost option. McDougall said that the Styrofoam bowls in Sharples on Ice Cream Bar nights are there to make up for the fact that the dining hall does not have enough bowls. Her only solution was to move them next to the regular bowls so that students would consciously have to choose between the two types of bowls. Larimore suggested that a group of students collect stolen flatware and dishware from dorms in order to alleviate this problem.

Larimore’s comment showed a theme that ran throughout the evening — much of what goes on in dining services doesn’t have to be a mystery. In fact, the panel members sounded eager to hear student input and make changes to the services and food options they provide. “[The panelists] said they got most of their suggestions through the napkin board and emails. I now know that I can use that for a forum, and I will be telling other people that as well,” Crampton said.

Crampton, a Green Advisor and member of Earthlust, attended the panel with a sustainability agenda. “I was really encouraged that a lot of the student questions at the forum were about sustainability in Sharples,” she said. “What I took away from that night is that if students want something they should just ask for it.”

Some students, such as Amalia Feld ’12, are doing just that. Feld, who attended the panel, works as a sustainability consultant to Dining Services. One of her first projects was Local Food Night, for which she put together a food labeling system and a map depicting the sources of the food items available.

The only questions specifically about food were generated by the moderator.

“I was a little disappointed. In order to be effective and make changes we need feedback from our customers. In addition to the low student turn out we also experienced a low number of responses from the survey student council emailed to the student body,” McDougall said in an e-mail. For McDougall, student input and assistance is key to the success of the dining hall. “My job is to make you guys happy. Sometimes there’s a perception that dining services won’t give you what you want. That’s not true. We ask students all the time for suggestions and recipes,” she said at the panel. Students who missed the opportunity can respond to the Student Council Dining Services questionnaire that was emailed out in early November.

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