Lately around campus there has been a heated debate concerning the quality of food served daily at Prospect Dining Hall, a service brought to you by the Sodexho Corporation. A large amount of students depend on this service and have been voicing dissatisfaction, while some students seem to be content with the service they have received. As you read, you’ll see that this issue touches all points on the spectrum of opinion. Please keep in mind that some student opinions expressed are pure speculation.
In order to shed light on how Prospect works, I recently sat down with Chris Mongeon, General Manager of Dining Services at Prospect.
I began with a question that many people around campus can appreciate: Is the students’ nutrition important to you, or are you just trying to fill our stomachs?
Mongeon stated: “Nutrition is as important to us as it is to the student. The student body can pretty much pick whatever they want to eat. As much as they request low fat items or healthier items—80% of the time they’ll go for pizza and hamburgers, the stuff they’re used to. Low fat, low cholesterol, low calorie; that stuff is readily available. It’s not our most popular selections, but we do offer it. When you’re feeding two thousand students, we could serve fourteen orders of eggplant casserole, a healthy dish, and put it next to hamburgers and sell fifteen hundred hamburgers. The choice is there. If they eat it we’ll make more, but we’re not going to make a bunch of healthy food and throw it out just because the majority of the clients prefer the alternative.”
When asked why Sodexho gets the food they get, Mongeon replied, “The food items must meet certain specifications put forth by our corporate offices. Examples of specifications: Tomatoes have to be large enough so two slices can cover a bun, chickens have to be a certain weight so they’re plump and full, and all beef products are USDA choice or better. We get the food we get because the students deserve the highest quality, so we buy the best stuff we can get for the money.”
Mongeon then took me on a tour of the food storage facilities, where many well-known brand names could be seen inside the huge refrigerators. Some of the more well known brands are as follows: Tyson, Hillshire Farms, Pillsbury, Ken’s Steakhouse Dressing, Mcain, Kraft, Nabisco, Heinz, Smuckers Jelly, Lipton, Minute Maid, and General Mills.
As for the menu? “We go with tried and true things that have worked in years past, plus your [the student body’s] suggestions. We try to mix it up so there’s enough variety to appease everybody. We added in the vegetarian bar last year trying to offer more items to people as they were changing their dining habits.”
Chris Mongeon explains how Prospect makes money. After all, and most importantly, it is a business. “Students with a meal plan pay $3.13 per meal, of which 45% goes to food cost. Overall the customer is paying a measly $1.14 for each meal. Our money is not made by feeding inferior, low quality products. We make money off of missed meals. If someone has a nineteen meals on their meal plan and only uses ten meals a week, the meals that they miss is where our profit is made. It’s based on a percentage. If everyone came to every meal it would cost much more. That’s pretty much how it works in this industry.”
I inquired if Management ever receives complaints about food making people sick. He replied, “We get isolated complaints every now and then, but after we research it, most of the time it turns out to be the stomach flu or a virus going around. The key thing to remember is at any given meal we’ll generally feed a thousand people. If one person has an upset stomach because of the food, why didn’t the other nine hundred people get sick if they’re eating the same thing?” A valid point. “Certainly we’ll take any complaint seriously. We’re not going to deny any type of rumors or brush them off. We’ve got all the necessary precautions in place to try to prevent any type of food borne illness or anyone from getting sick.”
In spite of Prospect’s strict safety regulations, concern for the actual safety of Prospect’s food is still a major issue among the students. Many people have told stories of getting very sick soon after eating at Prospect. I myself have witnessed an alleged “Prospect poisoning.” Seth Dickinson (first year student, and my roommate) started to feel sick about two hours after eating tacos at Prospect. Around an hour after dinner he was completely normal, wrestling with his girlfriend, seemingly not a health problem bothering him. Energetic turned apocalyptic almost instantaneously. He ended up vomiting for over three hours. After a while he had nothing left to evacuate, but still he hunched over the waist can, sweating and violently dry heaving. The dry heaving came in waves and the sound of it was literally deafening. He was hurting a lot. Countless times I told him, “Dude, that’s not natural. You should go to the hospital.” I was genuinely concerned for his life, and eventually I convinced him to get help.
My roommate ended up spending the night at the hospital. He was so dehydrated they had to inject three saline IV bags. Who knows what Seth’s condition would be if he had never gone to the hospital; I’d prefer not to think about it. According to the doctor, it was stomach flu. According to Seth Dickinson, “I’d like to believe it was the flu, but when I woke up the next day I felt like nothing was wrong.” I asked him his feelings on Prospect after his bad experience. He said, “I thought the food was great until I got sick. Now I don’t trust the food there anymore. My meal plan is 14 meals a week, and I only go two or three times. When I do go, I usually only get the salad.”
Dave Kelly, a second year student, gives his two cents on prospect: “Honestly the selection is good, but the quality is not up to par. I don’t understand why the food in the HUB seems so much better if it comes from the same supplier. For example: I’d take the HUB’s pizza over Prospect’s pizza any day of the week.”
When asked what she thought of Prospect, Augusta Blackstone, a first year student, gave a vague statement containing some deep profound meaning readers can meditate on themselves. “Treasures can be found amidst the travesty that is the ‘food,’ a.k.a. ‘a diamond in the rough.’”
When asked to describe her experiences with the employees at Prospect, first year student Corrie Curran simply said, “When the service comes with a smile, it really goes a long way.”
Sabrina Blanco, a sophomore, says: “The variety has improved greatly since last year. They’re being more creative with the meals they make, and overall the food is satisfactory for a college meal plan compared to other colleges I’ve seen. My family visited and said they really enjoyed the food. Really, the only thing I would like to see improved is the vegetarian section.”
On the subject of Vegetarianism, Laura Wright, a vegetarian first year student, states: “At Prospect, there’s no choice for vegetarians in the protein department. They may put out tray of raw, unseasoned tofu at the salad bar; but if they had knowledge about vegetarian meals, they would know tofu is a food that must be prepared. Any self-respecting vegetarian would never eat slimy raw tofu. I doubt if they even wash it. As for the veggie burgers, if they cook on the same grill next to greasy hamburgers, the veggie burgers are tainted and no longer vegetarian.”
A note to the student, your input really matters to the folks over at Prospect. Your suggestions are important to the decision makers there, after all you are the client and they want to do their best to accommodate you. If you have a problem with the service you are receiving, the only way to solve it is to let them know. As you can see, this issue is far from over. If you have something important to say, please feel free to log onto the brand new digital version of The Clock, at www.theclockonline.com. There you can discuss this issue in an open bulletin board forum. Who knows, you might see your thoughts in a follow up article.