Outsourcing Dining Services
Dining has been catching a lot of slack as of late. And some big changes are still in store. It’s not news to anyone that next year dining services will practically stop catering outside the prescribed locations – dining halls, 51 main, and the Grille. Need food at Winter Ball? Relay for Life? Ron’s house? Look somewhere else because the school is getting out of the catering business.
Maybe the school already is looking somewhere else.
An anonymous tipster writes in to MiddBlog with concerns about Sodexo submitting a bid to run catering services for the school. I had to look that up myself: Sodexo. Apparently, says Wikipedia, Sodexo is one the world’s largest food service providers. They often times come in to a university and run the entire dining system from silverware to salmon for profit. I can imagine the problems already. Wesleyan, for instance, outsources its dining and recently switched from Aramark to Bon Appetit, both large/direct competitors to Sodexo. Talk to your friends at other schools and chances are their schools use a big company like Marriott for dining.
I’m not jumping to conclusions, but going out on a limb here, Sodexo is not good news for Middlebury College. I understand the need to cut costs but this is the equivalent to bringing in a Wal-Mart to replace the Ben Franklins. There is an employment issue here as well as a service quality issue. That said, the school is looking save money. The event this past weekend may have been a test-run for Sodexo to run large-scale catering like Bread Loaf dining during the summer or graduation luncheons where they would bring everything in and pack everything (including trash) out. My guess is that if the College gets it at the right price, Sodexo may be put on a short list of approved caterers for College functions. To be fair, I don’t see many local caterers being able to handle the number of diners that Sodexo can handle. But coming down from Canada or up from Boston, somehow I doubt that Sodexo is big on local foods, local employees, and local economies.
The dining halls may not be in danger (and if they are, we’re screwed), but it is a slippery slope when bringing in multinational outside vendors to outsource work.
EDIT 5/4, 2PM: The post has been edited to reflect the fact that there has been no confirmed instance of Sodexo catering an event on campus.
EDIT 5/5: I attended Ron and Tim’s “College Finances” evening meeting for students (attended by 10 students). They addressed this issue at length saying that first, Sodexo has not been on campus, as noted above. Second, Sodexo may bid on BreadLoaf and/or large catering events. Small catering events will likely be pushed to local vendors like Two Brothers and Midd Market, etc. And, of course, there is no plan for dining halls with Sodexo, so no need for alarm there. By “slimming down” dining services, the College is expected to save $1.5 million. On another note, discussions have begun about changing open dining (to a tiered system, with unlimited as an option) some time in the future but this is not a new discussion as there are always people who don’t like the one-size-fits-all meal plan. Ron also mentioned the possibility of some sort of “MiddCard” that could be introduced with a new dining system so that students could buy meals at The Grille with points or credits, like at other schools. Again, very prelininary.
And what about Middlebury’s commitment to local food?
Local food: overpriced….subsidy of someone’s hobby
Ben Franklin: overpriced, obsolete, nearly useless. You could go to an efficient retailer and walk out with twice as much stuff for the same money. nuke it.
Having eaten at Midd before I must say, a switch to outsourcing your dining services would be a disaster.
At Trinity we have a food service called Chartwells. The company is slow to respond to student concerns/requests and for all intents and purposes is only here to make a quick buck. They aren’t understanding of problems and to be honest their food quality sucks.
Be wary of this change…trust me it won’t be for the best.
Was this the schwanky thing in the Great Hall on Friday evening?
Re: Alicee
While local food often does cost more dollars per calorie than food imported from large agribusiness in the mid-west, there are a few other factors that can make local food a better overall deal:
1. Better return on each dollar spent.
When you buy food from Kellogg, Smithfield, Tyson, or any other large agribusiness, much of the money you spent goes to the distributing corporation and its shareholders; money leaves Middlebury and food comes in. When you buy food from small local farms, rather than sending money out to Wall Street and the corporate headquarters, you are sending it to farmers living in our community. When these farmers (most of whom are NOT hobbyists) make money by selling their wares, there is a significant chance that much of it will stay within the community in the form of their purchases as well as local and state income and sales taxes. By buying food from local farmers you are also supporting other local businesses that cater to those farmers, as well as yourself as the recipient of services (roads, police, etc) paid for by taxes on the same farmers.
2. Better alignment of values
Industrial agriculture in the United States is largely based around the energy intensive overproduction of corn funded by large governmental subsidies. I encourage you to read Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” for more details, but a huge amount of petroleum and natural gas go into making fertilizer and powering the equipment and trucks required to base our food system on corn. Eating industrially not only supports the massive feedlots and thousands of cows-per-day meat-packing factories, but also Exxon-Mobil and the oil-states before them. Eating locally (and from small farms) uses much less overall energy and funds people you might meet rather than the Saudis.
3. Better for animals
The idyllic farm scene is a myth for the vast majority of cattle and birds eaten for meat in this country. Cattle are very specially designed (with 4 parts of their stomachs) to eat grass. Force-feeding them corn in a muddy feed-lot because it provides cheap calories quickly is very bad for cows. Luckily, we live in a place with many small farms that can and do provide their cattle and birds with lots of fresh air and pasture. By buying from local farms we can see for ourselves the lifestyle afforded to those animals we choose to eat.
4. Better for the environment
When cattle and other animals are on a farm, waste becomes fertilizer which then helps to feed the animals and ourselves. When the animals are removed from the farm we get a problem of infertility requiring artificial fertilizers on the fields, and giant manure pits and a waste-management nightmare at the feed-lots. Small farms at least have a good chance at working with the environment rather than against it.
I sincerely hope that the college continues its support of local agriculture and does not turn its dining operations over to Sodexo. Even if Sodexo were to prepare locally purchased foods (doubtful) they would still be taking on this business to make a profit. That profit has to come from somewhere — either by higher costs to students, lower quality foods, or lower wages for staff. We owe it to ourselves and our community to continue to provide high-quality food along with fair wages and working conditions for the people who prepare it.
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