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BY JACK KEEFE

In print | December 7, 2006

She calls them “Shoggles.” They’re roughly analogous to “Swoggles,” pastry chef Susan Willis ‘09 explained. In a few words, she said, "Like Swoggles, there comes a time when Sharples food tastes good, and you know you’re in trouble."

Hyperbolic, perhaps, but this comment displays a unique example of a significant undercurrent of opinion among the Swarthmore student body. While certainly not the only opinion out there, some students at Swarthmore have grown disenchanted with Sharples — with the options, with the quality, with the food in general. Although part of the problem appears to be the fact that Sharples is the only effective dining option on campus, not everything can be explained by the monotony of the locale.

This week, The Phoenix picks apart the question: What is wrong and what is right with dining at Swat?

A Cliché Comparison? Food at Bryn Mawr

Although it is difficult to compare them meaningfully without experiencing them both, dining at Swarthmore contrasts in many ways with dining at Bryn Mawr. For instance, Swarthmore has one dining hall for approximately 1,500 students, while Bryn Mawr has three dining halls with separate themes for approximately 1,300 students. Erdman is their primary dining hall, open until 6:30 p.m. Monday through Thursday and until 7 p.m. on weekends. Haffner provides mostly “static” selections from day to day (meaning in this case a static type of food, but different recipes), including a pizza bar, until 6:30 p.m., while a primary feature of Rhoads is its 8 p.m. closing time Monday through Thursday. As an alternative to a snack bar, take-out service is also available from the Rhoads Dining Hall during regular open hours.

“The lines in some of the dining halls [get] a little long sometimes,” Bryn Mawr Director of Dining Services Bernie Chung-Templeton explained. “One of the things we started doing are these specialty bars … it started out as simple things with pasta bars and things like that. You have another option of getting some food — spaghetti and meatballs and some garlic bread, maybe. We saw that it also basically relieved the pressure on our menu.”

At Bryn Mawr, interest among the student body has led to purchasing of organic products in addition to the mass-marketed food product from SYSCO Food Distribution, Bryn Mawr’s primarily supplier.

“We want to do good food and do it consistently … we have all kinds of organic foods and natural foods,” Chung-Templeton said. “One of the things I am championing right now is to try to figure out how we can build up our sustainability. We do buy some local produce — but, unfortunately, in the mid-Atlantic region the growing season is very short.”

In terms of number of rotating food options, Sharples and the Bryn Mawr dining halls appear to be on fairly equal footing. Though Bryn Mawr runs on a six-week cycle and Sharples a four-week cycle, an analysis of their respective menus seems to reveal an equal number of recipes spread out over different lengths of time.

“I think that we’re offering a lot more at each meal than they’re offering, and that appears to explain [the two different cycles],” Swarthmore Director of Dining Services Linda McDougall said.

The primary question remains, however: is Bryn Mawr food better than Sharples food?

“I think the quality of the food [at Bryn Mawr] is better … On Saturday mornings at Erdman you can make your own fresh-squeezed orange juice — they have a juicer and sliced oranges. At Haffner you can make your own fruit smoothies, using fresh fruit and yogurt.”

However, not everyone agrees that Bryn Mawr food is superior to Swarthmore’s. “I was underwhelmed by Bryn Mawr food,” Lauren Stokes ‘09 said. "It wasn’t significantly different from Sharples. [The choices in the one dining hall] were less than that of Sharples."

For those who want to try out the food at the other Tri-Co schools for themselves, dining passes can be obtained in the Dining Services office in Sharples.

Food Sources & Quality

The distributor who provides the bulk of products to Dining Services is Feesers Food, centered in Harrisburg. Produce arrives from Night Owl in Chester, dairy products come from Wawa, meat is delivered from Esposito’s Meats out of Philadelphia, and most of the breads are delivered from the Petros and Buono bakeries, located in Chester.

Commenting on their method of product and vendor selection, McDougall said, “Generally, we send out a list of the products we’re interested in buying and then we get pricing from them … but our decisions are not only based on pricing, but a lot of it has to do with their service. Someone can have great pricing but have lousy service.”

For recipe selection, according to McDougall, Sharples frequently does survey counts of how much food is present before and after the meal hours to see what was selected and what was not, keeping the good and tossing the bad. However, although technically offering around 1,400 recipes in its active computer database, one of the gaps in product offerings for Sharples is organically grown and produced ingredients and produce. To put it bluntly, there are none.

“We don’t have anything organic [in Sharples], to be honest with you,” McDougall said. “There may be a few things floating around. If anybody knows anything about organic foods, it’s that they’re expensive … We did this experiment probably 10 years ago where we bought organic apples and supermarket apples, and kids would not eat the organic apples because they look ugly.” However, McDougall recognized the datedness of the study and thought it would be “interesting” to see whether there was really a trend toward the organic. Nonetheless, she emphasized that organic products cost roughly “double the price of other produce.”

Even in the midst of financial concerns, it would seem there is, at the very least, a growing contingent of students supporting organic products, if not a large number.

“and labeled) at Sharples today, there is no doubt that students would choose it over conventional food,” Willis said in response to the study. “Even if they didn’t before, students here now realize the importance of sustainable practices in their everyday life - take, for example, the recent Earthlust rally for wind power - and organic agriculture is imperative for the future viability of the planet.”

Another concern expressed by those interviewed was over the possible lack of freshness of the food prepared at Sharples.

“We receive food deliveries from Feeser’s Monday, Wednesday and Friday … That food is generally turned over within three days. We get produce a minimum of five days a week and sometimes six days, so that turns over within a day or two,” McDougall said, “We get deliveries of fish and poultry mostly on the day we will be serving unless it sometimes needs to marinate, then we get it the day before.”

Though ostensibly fresh and from licensed vendors, sometimes the perception of the agedness and quality of the product is less than positive.

“Sometimes, the ingredients are obviously not very fresh — sometimes the salad bar is not very fresh, and the bread selection is very, very sad,” Willis said. “I’ve become vegetarian since I’ve gotten here because of Sharples, because the meat products are sub-par. It’s the quality of the meat — it’s not a very high quality product, which is understandable.”

Another Perspective: Transfer Student Opinions

While it’s easy enough to pinpoint the general atmosphere on campus toward Sharples, and a little easier after that to make the obvious comparisons between dining among the Tri-Co members, it’s perhaps more interesting to observe the differences between Swarthmore dining and that of schools outside our geographic region.

“I think because everyone’s forced to eat at Sharples, they’re making for more people and making in mass quantity … I don’t know how they can solve that problem, but that’s why the quality of Sharples food suffers,” Barnard College transfer Libby Murphy ’09 said.

Relating her experience at Barnard to Sharples, she explained, “Columbia food, which is mass-produced for about 2,000 or more people every day, was disgusting … while Barnard was for the 500 or so freshman and maybe 200 upperclassmen. So there were so many fewer people eating in our dining hall, so our food was so much better [than Columbia’s]. Because there were fewer options, what they made they had to make well.”

However, as a vegetarian, College of William and Mary transfer Jess Engebretson ’09 has found a significant increase in quality and choice for meatless food at Swarthmore in comparison to her old alma mater.

“It’s nice that they have vegetarian options day-to-day. At William and Mary, it was pretty much salad day after day, which was tiring and probably not very healthy,” Engebretson said.

Returning to a solely Swarthmorian perspective, Ben Mazer ‘10 complained about the vegetarian offerings. "There’s not enough solid vegetarian food — it’s either beans and mush or tofu and mush or vegetables and mush, and it sometimes feels like baby food."

Reforming the System

Running on a platform with an explicit interest in reforming what Dining Services has to offer, one of Student Council Financial Policy Representative Ilya Faibushevich ’07’s first actions (along with Joella Fink ’07) was to discuss with Dining Services his plans for bagged dinners.

Starting after fall break, the bagged dinners, which run from Monday to Saturday, contain a meat or vegetarian sandwich, a small salad or piece of fruit, chips and a choice of fountain beverage.

Though Faibushevich emphasized that his initial impression of student opinion of the addition has been “very positive,” he still feels as if there are elements of the bagged dinners that could be significantly improved, and he is in discussion with Dining Services to express these concerns.

“They run out really quickly — we’re happy that people use it, but I’ve had several people tell me that they come at 7:20 and they have no bagged dinners left. They just need to make more,” Faibushevich said. “At least in one instance, they’ve used bagged lunch sandwiches for dinner, which is kind of disgusting.”

Other initiatives in the works include trying to get bagged lunches to be served in multiple places (including the Science Center), a plan to keep Sharples open for longer hours and a developing discussion on how to improve the first-year meal plan to fit new lifestyles. Possibilities raised for the latter include a staggered “shopping period” for the meal plan in which first-years could switch to an adjusted 17- or 14-meal plan after a few weeks, or the possibility of allowing “double-mealing” at Tarble on the 20-meal plan.

“Some people proposed allowing freshmen to double-meal. That would be great, but I don’t think there’s any way Dining Services would ever go for that, because that would literally run Tarble out of things,” Faibusevich said. “From what I understand, one of the sources of revenue for Dining Services is their dependence on unused meals of students — I’m not sure of the validity of that.”

In regards to the perception that the freshman meal plan is a source of required, expected revenue for Sharples, McDougall disagreed vehemently, saying, "The … perception is totally not true. What students fail to realize is that a board plan budget is based on a missed meal factor.

“On average we run close to a 94 percent participation where the average in the industry is around 70 percent. This means that even though students may not eat a meal in Sharples, they take advantage of the meal equivalency in the snack bar, packouts and box options. Breakfast participation may run short, but our lunch and dinner participation is high compared to the average.”

What else can be done? Against stereotypes of blind ignorance, students do have substantial opinions as to the direction Sharples can take to move to a better standard of quality.

“I think they should avoid themes in the rotation,” Murphy said. “They should stick to more basic food — a good piece of chicken with vegetables. They try to put too many sauces and try to overcomplicate things.”

From the perspective of Student Council, Dining Services has been especially amenable and willing to work with student-led initiatives to make change in the dining environment of Swarthmore.

“I would say so far that my experience [working with Dining Services] has been pretty positive. It seems that they’re trying — they’re not always succeeding, but they’re trying to understand the student perspective,” Faibushevich said. “Linda is trying to work beyond budgets and profits to see what students really need.”

This appears to be a trend — that although there is some amount of disconnect between students and Dining Services, when a student concern actually grows to a manifest, visible level, it is usually addressed to some degree.

Another recent example of this trend, arguably, is Dining Services’ response to the vote to let the contract with Coke expire — although the cost analysis says Pepsi may cost $25,000 more, McDougall plans to work with this fact and make a special request for funding in her budget.

“food@swarthmore.edu), which goes to all the managers and we respond to that and any individual e-mails to us, the management team … or you can stop in and see us — we’re always welcoming students to come in and talk with us. It all has to come from student suggestion,” McDougall said.

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