At Tufts University, we enjoy relatively good overall dining facilities. It is, in fact, one of the perks of going to this school. Most every day, and unlike many Jumbos, I relish the chance to eat at the dining halls: I love the carved roast beef at Dewick-MacPhie Dining Center (where it is better- cooked than at Carmichael Dining Center) or Stir-Fry Night at Carmichael. Yet there is something absolutely galling about Tufts Dining Services that has come up as of late, and that is the subject of this article.
I am maddened by how the Dewick and Carmichael dining staffs start cleaning up and clearing food well before their general mealtime closing times. To me, this is an affront that I find appalling, ridiculous and worthy of change. Just recently I found myself entering Dewick at 8:15 p.m., only to find that the ice cream, broccoli, carved Moroccan beef, chicken drumsticks, Bourbon steak tips, vegetarian tortellini and even the marinara sauce were all mysteriously "finished" and nowhere to be found. Asking the lady who was cleaning up the main buffet table — the one that had cod, rice, potatoes and drumsticks (once upon a time) — proved futile: She, too, affirmed that the food was "finished," and that there was nothing she could do.
Thus, there was essentially no hot food at Dewick, even though the dining hall was completely packed with people! Frustrated and angry, I started pestering employees, as I had not eaten since brunch at 11:30 a.m. due to impending finals. After about 10 minutes of banter and ranting, I managed to have a kindly dining staff employee miraculously "find" an entire Moroccan beef steak and a full tray of broccoli. I was hence able to salvage what would have otherwise been a truly disastrous dinner.
After some conversation with friends who were there at the time, I discovered that this phenomenon of food disappearing and employees acting like the dining hall was about to close about an hour too soon was not unique to Dewick Sunday dinner at 8:15 p.m. Numerous friends of mine — many of them athletes with irregular schedules, but also friends with classes from 6:00 to 8:30 p.m. — have complained that both dining hall staffs start this routine of clearing out hot food and cleaning the halls at 3:30 p.m. (sometimes even at 3:00 p.m.!), even though dinner starts at 5:00 p.m. and lunch ends at 4:59 p.m. The Tufts Dining Services website lists Dewick's lunch hours as 11:00 a.m. to 4:59 p.m., not 11:00 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Dewick's Sunday dinner hours are likewise from 5:00 to 9:00 p.m., and do not end at 8:30 p.m.
Now, I fully understand that every non-student employee has a family and a life to get to. But that is simply not an excuse to lazily renege on a commitment to students. Putting away the food earlier is obviously convenient for the dining staff because it means that they will have less work to do later, after the dining hours are over, and can thus leave sooner. Taking away hot food that will probably never be finished might be good for Tufts' budget and the environment as well. (It is also, perhaps, just a casual coincidence that hot foods at lunches frequently consist of leftovers from the previous day's dinner). But late-night diners — who, as meal-paying students, have every right to eat the same food as earlier diners if the dining hall actually has food, which as my example above showed, it did — suffer greatly. The Tufts Dining Services staff's mentality in "closing shop early" is unacceptable, and to act in such a vain and selfish manner is ridiculous and disrespectful toward the Tufts community as a whole, especially toward first- and second-year students who simply cannot opt out of meal plans and fork over a lot of money each year to subsidize the Dining Services' costs. For the roughly $12 that dinner costs, it is absurd and shameful that the dining halls remove almost all the hot food with 25 percent of dinner time still remaining.
I am quoting and paraphrasing from its website here: The Tufts Dining Services pledges to students that it will both provide them with "friendly [and] helpful staff" and strive to "improve our services to respond to and better meet your needs." Sadly, it seems that Tufts Dining Services must urgently improve on both fronts.
