This isn't your father's dining experience. As today's Middlebury students grow increasingly savvy about what they consume, they're changing the way we think about college dining
By Melissa Pasanen
Photography by Bob Handelman
On a late-summer afternoon, the Middlebury College organic garden is deceptively quiet. The students took off a few hours ago to deliver today's harvest to Dining Services, leaving the garden silent—but hardly still.
The solar panels of the state-of-the-art well system are busily soaking up energy. Silvery-green bouquets of broccoli florets; fat, crimson tomatoes; and delicately frilled lettuce are pulling sustenance from the rich, loamy soil and the warmth of the sun. Under the shade of a few trees, honeybees buzz softly around their stacked hives. Somewhere, the resident groundhog is planning his next attack on the green beans.
The three-acre garden sits on a knoll in the middle of a corn field just one-quarter mile west of campus. But if you climb up to the sod roof of the garden's sturdy shed, the gentle thrum of a thousand crickets rises to meet the rhythmic drone of a nearby farmer's plow, and you might as well be 50 miles away—until the sweet chime of Mead Chapel wafts easily down the hill. The effortless musical blending of the two worlds is almost surreal, like a dream.
Two years ago the garden was just a dream for Jean Hamilton '04, Chris Howell '04, and Bennett Konesni '04, who led a core group of students through dozens of Sunday night planning meetings at a long table on the third floor of Bicentennial Hall. They researched exhaustively, wrote grants, crafted a business plan, and presented their goals to anyone who would listen. Standing recently in Bi Hall, one floor up from the location of all those meetings, Konesni looked down at the table and then out through the window to the small green and brown patch on the distant knoll. "It's our little dream come true," he said, almost in awe. "Our little oasis in a giant sea of corn."
Back outside in the fresh air—where he is much happier—Konesni enthusiastically ran down the day's harvest: 18 sunflowers, three giant bags of mesclun, six bunches of onions, plus leeks, radishes, nasturtium flowers, gourds, chard, and kale. But what excites him even more than the garden's bounty is that a couple of professors came to help, as did several other members of the community. "It could have taken three hours to gather, but eight people showed up and it only took an hour," he said with satisfaction.
The massive pumpkins and double-dug rows are impressive, but the cofounders all agree that the best thing to come from their garden is, as Hamilton puts it, "just how many people have come together to make this work." And she starts to list them: a local beekeeper brought his bees; Bill McKibben and President McCardell picked rocks; Chris's and Bennett's dads helped build the shed; Otter Creek Bakery gave seed potatoes. Jay Leshinsky, a former College employee and gardening expert, has volunteered countless hours. Local alumni like Pete Johnson '97 of Pete's Greens in Craftsbury and Susan Gallagher Borg '68 of the Weed Farm in Lincoln offered encouragement, along with free plants and seeds. Other local farmers, seed companies, and area residents gave advice and shared resources. The spouse of a Middlebury professor brought his tractor. Middlebury's Environmental Council supported the project with a grant, and the five residential Commons each bought a share in the garden's projected harvest, creating a distinctly Middlebury spin on community-supported agriculture.
Growing food, the students have learned, can pull people together. "Food is nonpartisan," observes Konesni. "Everybody needs it, and everyone appreciates the taste of a good carrot." But, as Jay Leshinsky comments, "It's about a lot more than vegetables."
The universal need for food overlays a wide range of attitudes towards what we eat, and a college campus is a microcosm of those attitudes. For most people, food is much more than fuel. It can be a source of comfort, a way to connect with family, culture, and community. It can make political statements, and it can become entwined in personal struggles. In Vermont, it is also the landscape and the livelihood of many of our neighbors.
For more than 150 Middlebury Dining Services employees, food is a career—and a source of pride. Many come from farming families, and they are especially pleased that an increasing number of students show an interest in food beyond how much they can pile on their tray. "These students are very aware of what's on the plate, and I really appreciate that," says Charlie Sargent, head purchaser for Middlebury Dining Services, whose uncle was a dairy farmer.
Sargent is on the advisory board for the College garden, and he's a strong supporter of the project, as are many Dining Services employees. Hamilton remembers the warm reception the Dining Services staff gave the very first harvest of spinach and radishes early this past summer. The radishes, she admits, were extra peppery from a stretch of sunny, dry weather. "But they all crowded around and said, 'Oh, it's so beautiful!'" Hamilton recalls. "It got us all fluffed up."
Although the garden's bounty grows a little closer to home than most of his orders, Sargent is used to working with local farmers. Middlebury is the only academic institution in the state that is a member of the Vermont Fresh Network, an innovative program established in 1996 to encourage and facilitate partnerships between the state's farmers, food producers, and dining establishments. An emphasis on regional, fresh ingredients has become a given in many restaurants around the country, but it has only more recently hit the college dining arena, where the scale of most operations and financial considerations have made local sourcing more of a challenge.
"We've basically always done it," Sargent explains, highlighting the College's flexible and dependable 50-year relationship with Monument Farms of Weybridge, a third-generation dairy farm with 700 cows, from which the College buys all its milk. "We were buying stuff locally because it made sense."
Sargent procures all the ingredients for the three student dining rooms—Proctor, the Freeman International Center (FIC), and the new Ross Commons—as well as the Redfield-Proctor staff-and-faculty dining room, Middlebury's Bread Loaf facility, and campus retail outlets, including the popular Grille and Juice Bar in McCullough Student Center. In addition to local foods like milk, maple syrup, apples, and some of the eggs, poultry, and vegetables the kitchens need, Sargent also orders mainstream products in large quantity, including more than 50 pounds of Rice Krispies each week—and that's just one of the 20 cereals he has to keep in stock. Within the demands of providing more than 5,000 meals a day, Sargent is constantly looking for creative ways to buy local food under reasonable budget constraints. This summer, for example, he worked out an agreement with a local vegetable farm to supply the College with surplus harvests for a good price.
Sargent—a Middlebury native who started working in the dish room in 1975—appreciates the personal connections to local suppliers, which, he believes, help make the College a more integral community member. He likes the fact that Agnes Benedict James '52 is part of the Monument Farms family, and that her two grandsons, Christopher and Andrew Everett (Classes of '01 and '07, respectively), have consumed the family's milk in the dining halls. Sargent thinks it's great that Stan Pratt of Happy Valley Orchards not only sells apples to the College, but also runs the Zamboni for the ice rink. And he proudly shares that the couple who own Hillsboro Sugarworks in Bristol credit Middlebury's steady syrup orders with enabling them to expand to 10,000 taps over 350 acres, turning a hobby into a full-time business.
But the bottom line is that Sargent wouldn't buy the food if he didn't think it was the best choice. "The kids are the big winners because they're getting the freshest product," he says, "like apples literally picked that day off the trees."
The commitment to local farms was just one of the many accomplishments cited when the Middlebury Dining Services won an Ivy Award in 1999, a prestigious food-industry honor also given that year to the Four Seasons Hotel in New York City and Philadelphia's City Tavern. The citation noted the "creativity and quality" of board-plan offerings like Tuscan bean soup, Vermont cheddar pie, and wine-steamed salmon; a partnership with the Montpelier-based New England Culinary Institute (NECI) that brought chef-instructors into the Middlebury kitchens to help staff acquire more "scratch" cooking skills when the College shifted away from buying items like prestuffed chicken breasts; and the popular "Monotony Breaker" themed dinners, which range from karaoke contests to last year's fanciful Harry Potter dinner, at which students enjoyed Hagrid's Roast Beast, Dumbledore's Baked Spudlings, and Weasley's Treacle Bread.
A visitor has only to peek into Middlebury's newest dining hall in Ross Commons, which
opened last fall, to see that Middlebury's dining operation continues to evolve and innovate. With its high arched ceilings, Vermont slate floors, blonde wood cabinetry, and Fiestaware-style china, Ross looks like a high-end food court designed by House Beautiful and catered by Wolfgang Puck. Chefs in whites toss crisp vegetarian stir-fry in woks, mix it on the Mongolian grill, and sear beef to order. As students stroll by to check out the evening's choices, a wild shitake mushroom pizza emerges piping hot from an oven behind the counter.
Brad Koehler, unit manager of Ross, is a former NECI chef-instructor who worked with the College as a consultant before coming on board full time to manage the first of Middlebury's five planned Commons dining halls. By the time all five are up and running, much of the food preparation will be decentralized and very little will be cooked in big, traditional food-service kitchens. "Here students can see the food being made," explains Koehler. "It doesn't appear from behind the magic wall like it used to."
Each dining hall will ultimately serve around 500 students, helping the Commons achieve its objective of creating smaller, more intimate social and recreational settings, explains Associate Dean of Faculty Tim Spears. During its first year, however, Ross was deluged with students excited about its progressive look and taste. A typical student comment card reads: "This place ROCKS! The food selection here is out of control. It is so amazing! Calamari, mushroom strudel . . . What is this? Five-star dining?"
There is, of course, always room for improvement. Students don't shy away from making a wide range of requests—more chicken noodle soup, more mashed potatoes, cereal available 24/7. All student comment cards are read closely by staff, says Dining Services Associate Director Matthew Biette. "Students today are more aware of their food," says Biette, who came to Middlebury from Tufts in 1997. "They watch the Food Network. Everyone knows about [Chef] Emeril. They'll let you know if you're wrong." Indeed, students want to make sure that vegetarian and vegan dishes are really what they say they are; they praise the panini grills at Proctor, the asparagus risotto at Ross, and the locally grown sprouts at FIC. But that doesn't mean they dismiss the basics, as Koehler notes with a chuckle, "When we do chicken patties—what I call fried hockey pucks—get out of the way. They love them."
Every couple of weeks, Matthew Biette calls a meeting of his student dining committee to check in and get feedback. He treats members to lunch at the Grille, the cash-only restaurant in the McCullough Student Center, where a fried calamari salad might be served on greens from a pet project of Biette's: a greenhouse warmed with excess heat generated by the College's compost pile of dining services food waste.
During the kickoff session in early September, seven students come through for lunch and to share their frank opinions on what Dining Services is doing right and where it might improve. Morgan Jones '04 mentions a recent news report about potentially dangerous chemical accumulations in farmed salmon. Should it be served so often? Jones asks.
Chris Shields '04, who explains that he is vegan for ethical reasons, has just returned from a year studying abroad in Paris where, he says, he was obliged to become vegetarian or starve. He thanks Biette for the "good black beans in the salad bar" and puts in a heartfelt plea for the return of Ben & Jerry's strawberry-kiwi sorbet. Biette notes that input from students like Shields helps staff proactively address the concerns of the increasing number of vegetarian and vegan students in the dining halls. "Like not putting tuna next to hummus in the salad bar," Shields offers.
Committee members Athenia Fischer '04 and Floyd Branch '06 are both from New York City, and they want to know why the dining halls don't serve fried chicken, something they both frequently eat at home. Biette explains that it's mostly a health issue; menu planners try to keep deep-fried food to a minimum. "It's good to get a perspective on why things are the way they are," Fischer allows, before she goes on to explain, "for me, it's like a cultural thing. To come here and not have it at all is hard."
Within this small group of students, many of the issues that touch on food have come up in just an hour's time—from health to ethics to taste to cultural identity. For college students, many away from family for the first time, familiar foods become symbols of home and ethnicity. They're on the way to fully independent adulthood and making their own food choices is yet another step on that path. Within the academic flurry of lectures, discussions, papers, and exams, mealtime can provide an escape—a welcome break with friends, a chance to reconnect and revitalize.
It's a little after five on an early fall Sunday afternoon, and the organic garden is once again relatively quiet. A brief rain has just passed through, leaving a glorious rainbow arching over campus, from the cupola of Hepburn Hall to the bulk of Bi Hall. A long trestle table is set up at the top of the knoll, empty but for a huge bowl of lettuce from the garden, sprinkled with tomatoes and bright edible blooms. Slowly, people start to wander into the garden carrying bags, baskets, plates of food. Some climb onto the shed roof, while others wander the rows of vegetables, marveling at the progress, while popping sweet cherry tomatoes into their mouths.
Konesni calls the crowd into a circle, and about 60 people—students, faculty and staff families, community members—join hands. He welcomes old friends and new and thanks everyone who helped make the garden a reality. "We thank you all for being here," adds Hamilton, "because you make the garden more beautiful just by being here." Everyone bows heads for a moment of silence until the quiet is broken by a restless child and someone calls, "Let's eat!"
Melissa Pasanen wrote "What's for Dinner?" in the spring 2003 issue.