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Yalie Cuisine. "We don't want students to feel that eating well is suffering," says Josh Viertel, explaining the philosophy behind the "sustainable" menu at Yale's Berkeley College dining hall, as reported by Alison Leigh Cowan in The New York Times. Twist is, it's the Yale students who can't have Berkeley's experimental organic meals who are suffering. They'll do just about anything to have at the burgers of "grass-fed lamb and freshly picked mint ... chicken brodo with pasta and greens and pork loin with fennel ... They try to slip fake identification cards past the Yale employees stationed at the entrance. They don sweatshirts with the Berkeley insignia to make it look as if they belong ..."
"Whatever they can get away with," says Catherine Jones, Berkeley's executive chef. It sure beats "picking from the same old nonorganic salad bars, scooping out the sugary cereals and chewing on chuck-patty hamburgers slipped into white bread rolls" like they do at Yale's 11 other dining halls. The idea for this "sustainable" dining hall, yale.edu/sustainablefood, was hatched four years by Alice Waters, a chef, "when her daughter Fanny became a freshman." The project started by turning "a vacant lot into a lush vegetable garden that doubles as a laboratory ... The three-meal-a-day rollout came in September 2003." The thinking is "that people and communities thrive when meals consist of locally produced, seasonal ingredients, rather than food that is shipped long distance or processed so it keeps."
The thought does have its limitations: "There'd be a rebellion if they ran out of blue Gatorade," says Patricia Hermann, a senior. And because of the program's emphasis on locally grown foods, avocados from California -- even though they're organic -- are not served. Exceptions are made "for bananas and coffee, because students expected them with breakfast." Yes, the "real food costs more" but Alice Waters, chezpanisse.com, hopes her vision will become "part of the experience of every child who goes to Yale." Meanwhile, sophomore Sarah Milby is thinking about starting a petition to take the Berkeley concept campuswide to Yale's 4,800 students: "It's obvious the students want it," she says.
Tim Manners, editor
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©2005 reveries.com |
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