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Posts tagged ‘food’

Nov 29

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LessMeat Mondays: What did you think?

Today, I had the pleasure of eating at Weybridge for one of their nightly dinners (yes, they post their menus too!). Afterwards, like any responsible student, I checked my Facebook before beginning my homework, only to find a flurry of “Meatless Monday” status updates. I then checked my email and soon began to understand what they were talking about.

With relatively little notice (Director of Dining, Matthew Biette, sent an all-student email explaining “LessMeat Mondays” at 3:56pm today), students learned that this evening they would be subject to a “trial run of LessMeat Monday… an environmental initiative brought to you by a group of students in Environmental economics,” in which an additional vegetarian dish would replace a meat dish.

Placated by the knowledge that there still would be a meat dish, I soon reached the next line: “While we encourage all students to choose the environmentally friendly vegetarian option, we also respect the right of each student to eat meat.”

Freshly thinking about hierarchies and binaries, thanks to my women and gender studies course, I could understand how this email sparked people’s interest. It clearly placed the “environmentally friendly vegetarian option” in a greater position than that of ‘meat eaters’ whose ‘rights must be respected.’  Is the freedom to eat what I want to eat a right I should be worried about? I didn’t think so, but now I’m slightly confused. Read more

Nov 5

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SGA Sound Off: Yes, Midd has an SGA. This is what we do.

Student Government Association Word Cloud. Yeah, that awesome!

Whenever the SGA is mentioned here at Middlebury, it always seems to solicit a rather unusual response: “Wait we have one?!” The follow up questions come in close for second and third: “What does it do? That’s just for PoliSci Majors right?”

As a resident SGA Senior Senator, I’d like to clarify a few things. First, we have an SGA. Second,  the SGA does (or can and should do lots of things). And third, SGA is not just for PoliSci majors (take it from me, a former neuroscience, literary studies, and now finally history major).

From my approximate eight weeks in office, I’d love to quickly provide an understanding of what I’ve learned the SGA does, why you should care, and how you should get involved.

What does SGA do? SGA serves as the central voice of the student body. Students’ dreams, hopes, fears, and all types of emotions and desires should be the concern and soul of the SGA.

The SGA, feasibly, can do two things:

Read more

Feb 22

Costello’s Market: better than Noonie’s?

You heard right.

At the expense of provoking controversy, I will profess my love for Costello’s Market, an astoundingly fresh, classy, cheap, down-to-earth Italian-style deli in Marbleworks.

Here’s a video, produced by Seven Days, of the process behind one of the shop’s more ambitious dishes, a porchetta (they have more typical lunch-y fare, too):

Of course, Noonie’s Deli is fantastic. But the crazy thing is, Costello’s is even better. Here’s why:

Pros:

  • Costello’s has (what I’m told is) really authentic Italian food. In addition to the video, Seven Days did a big feature on the tiny storefront deli; I’m not much of a foodie, but the Seven Days piece covers some of the finer culinary points, as well as the history of Costello’s.
  • AWESOME seafood. Their fried shrimp po boys and salmon patties elicit pavlovian slobbering from me even now.
  • Maybe the best fries in town… although I would need to do an intensive comparative study with Steve’s Diner to be sure on that.
  • Carolyn Costello and John Hamilton, the couple that run the establishment, are friendly and warm.
  • In terms of sheer quantity of food per dollar, Costello’s is not pricey by Middlebury standards.

Cons:

  • No indoor seating. Midd students will have to either take a car, risk carrying a box to a warm place with frostbitten hands, or just wait out the weather.
  • So many delicious options. Choosing can be painful.
  • Why didn’t I hear about this place until my junior year??

The College is well on its way to instituting a Food Studies minor… maybe it’s time we talked more about food on MiddBlog.

Jan 21

Healthy Competition

So the Juice Bar lives. The menu put together by the student team looks unambiguously healthy and profitable. Everyone will live happily ever after.

Thanks to crowdsourcing.

The Juice Bar competition was the most prominent example of the administration looking to harness the power of a crowd of students to solve one of the tougher campus challenges brought about originally by financial lows and now by some sort of “new normal.” Why hire professional consultants and staff to dream up new business models when students can conceive, build, and market it back to students?

It’s also appealing as a teachable experience. After all, that’s the idea behind the Solar Decathlon team too — task students with designing, building, and managing a solar powered house and they will learn a ton. Middlebury is clearly encouraging students to find their inner entrepreneur or at least find practical experience and skills applicable in the post-grad world.

But as with most crowdsourcing efforts, someone always asks: why are you pushing all the work on someone else? Why does everything have to be a competition? Don’t students have something else to do? Like study? Well, maybe there are ways to even wrap an academic element (heaven forbid) into some of the crowdsourcing efforts across campus. As the Atwater Turf Battle rages marches on with valiant blogging by Tim Parsons, students are inevitably marrying their architecture and geography (plus econ, math, etc.) classes with real challenge and real consequence.

That’s also where the administration hasn’t quite bit the bullet of really sticking to a real-world rules. While the Solar Decathlon team grapples with setbacks determined by the U.S. Department of Energy, Middlebury’s administration is mostly flexible in awarding a student “contract” because it will rely on strong mentorship from staff. But would a venture capitalist really allow unlimited start-up funding and no target profitability date for the Juice Bar venture? Is it even realistic to at least partially compete against dining halls which operate 9 hours a day? Even if it is an experiment, the mentality going in should always be that the project matters deeply and has definable success (even if it is not financial). Any evidence to the contrary will definitely sink hopes of sustainability. In other words, there needs to be the real threat of failure (even if there’s a safety net) and a healthy sense of competition (your move, Gamut Room). On the flip side, if students keep any profits they make, it would do a lot to keep the venture going, no?

Jan 11

2 Comments

Asian Carp Invasion, Part I

Midd Students are generally unfazed by the obscure bayaldis, risottos, gratins, stews, and ragouts served at Proctor dining hall. Even those who can tell the difference between their quinoas and bulgurs were unsure what to make of a new series of dishes prepared by the Proctor staff this year. The main ingredient? Asian carp. Perhaps in anticipation of student uncertainty, the staff prepared handouts about a little-known crisis in America’s rivers. For those of you who didn’t get the details, I’ll start out this series about Carp on campus with a brief summary.

First things first, though. Want proof that this whole Asian Carp thing is serious? Don’t believe that people go bow-hunting for fish? Watch this and sing a rousing chorus of the Star-Spangled Banner. Only in America.

Now that we’ll all have nightmares about fish attacks, here’s some more background information:

Asian carp, a term referring to several fish of Asian origin, escaped from fish farms into the Lower Mississippi in the late 1970s and have been spreading northward ever since. These aren’t your average minnows, either; carp can grow to be 5 feet long and over 100 pounds (not just fish story exaggeration, I promise). Despite their size, carp pick on the little guys and eat plankton. This means they’re disrupting the entire food system, from the bottom up, threatening the vitality of all native fish species, and, in turn, America’s freshwater fishing industry.

The last barrier to the Great Lakes is an electric fence at the Chicago Canal. Fear of a Great Lakes breach is so strong that officials dumped more than 2,000 pounds of fish poison into the waterway just to do quick fence maintenance last year. Asian Carp hysteria even reached the President: in February, the White House hosted an “Asian Carp summit,” and pledged nearly $80 million to prevent the spread of these backwater bullies.

Not only do these invasive fish threaten to disrupt ecosystems, but they also pose a danger to unsuspecting boaters as well, as seen in countless Youtube videos.

The fence can’t hold these greedy human-sized fish out forever, and we’re in need of more creative solutions to eliminate them. That’s where Richard O’Donahue, Proctor’s head chef, comes in. O’Donahue has been exploring carp as a sustainable, low-mercury food source. His staff has prepared carp patties (plain, but a good start), Asian carp meatball soup (getting better), carp meatloaf (not half-bad), and carp tacos (dry, but worth the effort). Despite facing a lack of available recipes and carp’s formidable bone structure, Richard says his staff plans to continue experimenting.

The dining staff is eager for feedback. Leave a comment here and also let Proctor know what you think. Check MiddBlog for updates!

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