From a favorite birthday cake flavor when you were little to the home-cooked meals that you can only get during Thanksgiving break, the impact of food on one’s life experience can’t be understated. College is no different. Despite the fanfare surrounding things like the student-to-faculty ratio and the research opportunities for undergrads at Tufts, if you ask any tour guide on campus what their most asked question is, chances are every one of them will say the same thing: ‘What is the best thing you’ve eaten on campus?’
While the yearly Lunar New Year dinner or the reliable Hodgdon Food-on-the-Run bowl are campus favorites, there’s one event that gets mentioned most of all. Food Fair, the crown jewel of Tufts Orientation week, is the first chance for all of the Tufts dining locations to show incoming students what they’ve got, and every spot pulls out all the stops. Kindlevan Café smoothies, Fresh at Carmichael Dining Center salmon and Hodgdon quesadillas all meet in this event that students keep talking about and never see again, yet there’s an unsung hero responsible for the whole thing: Tufts Catering.
Every tent, table or hot box of prepped food out on Res Quad that day is brought in by the catering staff earlier that morning. Catering is there an hour before the event, and it’s they who stay for two hours after cleaning up. They even run their own ice cream sundae stand during the event! And catering help doesn’t stop at the food fair. At parents’ weekend, pretzels, hot dogs and an entire tent dedicated to local apple farms are just part of what catering brings to the table. For those of us graduating soon, the lunches reserved for commencement are all bagged in the back of Mugar cafe over the course of multiple days. Senior brunch is a 1,500+ congregation that brings together future graduates to eat, and workers from every dining location on the main campus and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University campus provide the food. And yet, for all the end-of-year events that Tufts Catering is involved in, there is one location where they’re noticeably absent this year.
Gifford House, usually referred to as ‘the President’s House,’ sits on Packard Ave, overlooking one of the most populated streets on campus at any given time of day. At the end of the year, dinners and galas for trustees, donors and alumni all find their way into this venue, and up until this year, there’s been an unspoken agreement that Tufts Catering would be the only company hired for it all. However, this year, Boston Gourmet Catering will be handling all end-of-year events at Gifford House.
This change has not been well received by dining staff, particularly among those in catering. One catering worker described how the money made at events at the President’s House helps cover their child’s medications, and they aren’t the only one feeling this way. As the only dining location without regular hours, many catering workers depend on the end of spring semester work for a consistent, much-needed boost in income. Beyond that, dining staff at other locations also benefit from the extra hours after many dining halls and commercial locations close. Not only has this agreement helped individual dining staff keep up with the widespread increases in the cost of living, but it has also been a key step in ensuring money continues to cycle through Tufts Dining as a whole. Bringing in a private, more expensive company like Boston Gourmet is exactly the opposite of what Tufts should be doing. In recent times, the university has taken on a range of cost-cutting measures, much of it directed at dining. It’s insulting to think that the money saved is not even being used to benefit the greater Tufts community. With tuition increasing every semester, students are often left wondering where their money goes, and it is becoming more and more evident that it is not going towards the causes that matter. Beyond money, this switch only decreases the trust between the administration at Tufts and the rest of the university. How can students trust that their money will be used to their benefit when the administration has used it for anything but? How can dining staff, or any Tufts staff for that matter, feel secure at work when the administration takes active steps to minimize their role in campus activities? And if decreasing the catering staff’s work hours and hiring outside help is the first step of a bigger plan, what or who is next?
