Serve less meat.

It’s a pretty simple equation, and I’m surprised it hasn’t been suggested before. Cutting down on meat would both drastically reduce Midd’s meal spending and create a policy more in line with Middlebury’s social values. Midd is vehemently proud of its environmental record, but the fact that copious amounts of meat are served every day in the dining halls is constantly overlooked. For all of the pats on the back the college gives itself for its local vegetables, Midd still imports its meat from Tyson Foods, America’s largest meat processor with one of the worst environmental records of any company in history. More generally speaking, the meat industry is responsible for singlehandedly emitting more greenhouse gases than the entire transportation sector combined. (ref: United Nations Food and Agriculture Report 2006)

There is no reason Midd kids need to be offered a choice between chicken, hamburgers, and Alaskan salmon every night at dinner. Limit your offerings to one animal protein per dining hall per meal, and you will save thousands of dollars on dining costs. The environmental reward speaks for itself.

There have been estimates by dining of how much of a premium Middlebury’s current meal plan set-up costs, but ironically, without checkers or card swipes, they are only estimates. But we know there is a significant incremental cost that needs to be evaluated in terms of value to students.

As for dishes: I don’t know how long your experience with Middlebury is, but the missing dish situation is not new, and is most certainly tied to having no checkers or any kind of system at the dining halls to minimize or stop students from leaving with utensils and dishes. Before we moved to “no checkers,” this problem did not exist. And many have tried to address the situation over the past decade, including the dining services folks, student groups, the SGA, residential staff, etc. Any and all solutions have thus far relied upon the goodwill of those taking the dishes, and though the amount of missing dishes has seemed to have declined over the years (from a once-high, I believe, of $70,000/year to around $30,000 today), it is still a problem that frustrates many on campus and is dealt with elsewhere by having some kind of checker system in place. We have had collection days in the past (in different forms, sponsored by different groups), and the debates that surrounded the missing dishes (among students), and the disrespect students feel it represents, were often heated.

So I don’t propose our look at dining as any kind of “bait and switch,” but rather a realization that whatever we decide to continue that carries a premium to it (if the system were viewed as the best system by our peers — and by best I mean weighing the costs and benefits — we would not be the only school with it), and is one of many, many things we need to look at as part of the long process of looking at how we are using our resources. Any aspect of Middlebury that has had to change as a result of the changed financial situation could make a similar claim of baiting and switching; I don’t see the “baiting” here, but admit we might need to “switch” some of the things we do on campus. And perhaps not the meal plan, but it is always better to hear more than less from students about what makes what we do either more important or less important than we might think.

I welcome (and I know many students) would welcome some ideas for that fun campaign to reduce the missing dishing problem.

Thanks for your post.

Yes, implement some measures. I think having a person or two checking ID’s, with no penalty for going to another dining hall in the same evening offers no swiping per say, will at least establish a protocol for needing to pay for guests eating in the dining halls. I don’t think guests mind paying for a meal, but to jump ahead to creating a sliding meal plan is changing the culture of the school based on little in the way of hard numbers. And too.. your dish problem is not to be solved by creating a meal plan. Those are apples and oranges to my thinking. Certainly, a push to create a workable solution to get plates back to the dining halls (collection days,etc), should be put in place. But I don’t believe there are a ton of kids there who are intentionally rude or thieving (especially of dishware) and so I’d like to think that a concentrated and fun campaign to bring the dishes home could be successful.

In the other note – we need a solution to dishes! I ALWAYS bring back my dishes and often collect random dishes on campus that I see to bring back. There is a huge problem right now in Proctor about dishes. Perhaps if there were more options for plastic dish ware but we are not allowed to take dishes out of the dining hall? Or to save even more money, if we could ONLY take food out of the dining hall in our own container? Provide each student with a thermos and nalgene when they get to midd and allow them to take food out in that, but in nothing else? Trying to come up with ideas.

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