The Vassar Chronicles | The birth of ACDC and centralized dining

Jon Cruz Columnist

With the Quad protected from the proposed (and rather egregious) dining center that was to be located there, all seemed well for Campus Dining by 1971. Dining was centralized, the dining halls located in the dormitories were converted to multi-purpose rooms, and food service was streamlined.

But one of the major challenges to a centralized dining center on any campus is monotony: with few options, and only one dining hall, resentment can be (and often is) high among students. While few prospective students choose their colleges solely on food, an enthusiastic review of the dining facilities can be reflective of a content student body. Thus, administrators at many colleges are quite conscious of the amount of money being spent on campus dining and the opinions of students. The foundation of a Food Committee on campus—in which students took an increasingly active role in setting campus dining policy— portrays these concerns.

The Food Committee, however, has not been able to get the campus dining service off the hook all the time; in fact, it has had to help the service deal with an increasingly active and vocal student body.

Today, an issue of contention that occasionally rears its head is Vassar’s meal payment system, in which students pay individually for each item, rather than play a flat fee for meals overall. The latter system is quite common and is in place at a number of larger institutions, including Cornell and UCLA.

This plan, dubbed the “Variable Use Plan,” was controversial from the start, even if most Vassar students have come to accept it. It was based on a system implemented by Quinnipiac College and promoted as a cost-conscious method of feeding students and streamlining campus dining. The plan made its debut in 1993.

One of the great justifications for the adoption of this plan was that food choice would increase exponentially under a system that allowed for individuals to buy food items separately instead of under a flat meal plan. “At Quinnipiac, for example,” claimed one pamphlet distributed by the Food Committee, “their cafeteria served items such as popcorn shrimp, Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream and frozen yogurt. ARA would be able to give us better vegetarian items, for some of the ingredients are too expensive to purchase given the plan we now have. They would be able to offer steak, lobster night and other high priced items while continuing to serve favorites such as chicken on a bun.”

(Lobster night, unfortunately, does not seem to be an option anymore on most campuses.)

Apparently, a sizeable proportion of people on campus did not find this argument very convincing. So, on April 5, 1993, the Food Committee again attempted to clarify why they were moving towards such a system, particularly when people thought that food would not get any better.

“Many students are concerned that the quality of food at ACDC will not improve when we change to the Variable Use Plan,” the pamphlet noted. “However, for reason of economics, it is to the benefit of ARA to serve the best food possible. If students do not like the food served at ACDC, they will not use their points there. Those unused points will be forfeited to the college at the end of the academic year, not to ARA. Therefore, ARA will serve the highest quality of food they can, for they want the students to spend their money at ACDC.”

Of course, where else would they go? The pamphlet conveniently avoided that, whether or not students “spent” their points, they had still purchased a meal plan, and so they had an incentive to use it. This was particularly the case with students of more limited incomes; refunds on meal plans were not available.

While many were resentful of the change, they were pleased by the pithy statement that accompanied a release written by Andrew Meade, now Assistant to the Dean of the College, but then the Director of Dining Services: “ACDC will not need to be redesigned.”

Many students were, however, displeased by the renovation of ACDC that occurred three years ago. Aside from the inconvenience, there is a feeling among some that the food has actually decreased in quality and, perhaps more distressingly, that the selection of food has noticeably decreased.

“ACDC’s gotten worse, but it's not the variety,” commented Shep Saltzman ’06, “so much as it is that now it’s just cafeteria food.”

“I’ve found that after a few weeks, I now know intuitively what ACDC is going to serve before I ever enter the dining hall, because the scheduling has become so cyclical that it's kind of mind - numbing,” observed Jen Lagasse. “For example, every other Tuesday is sweet potato leek day. And what happened to potato leek by the way? That was my favorite thing at ACDC!”

To the dining service’s credit, however, there has always been an effort to occasionally spice things up: from specialty dinners to themed meals to dining center events, the staff has made a noticeable—if often, unfortunately, unacknowledged—effort to break the monotony. A great deal of credit is, rather objectively, due to the dedication and friendliness of the staff. (For more on this, refer to my interview with Katherine “Have a Good” Porter, published in an earlier issue of The Miscellany News.)

In fact, campus dining services used to hold occasional events at which guest chefs from abroad would join the campus and prepare an exotic meal. On Sept. 29, 1998, the campus welcomed a guest chef from Brussels, Carlo Lefevre, whose menu—a $7.50 “all you care to eat” affair—it included Kippensoep (chicken minestrone soup), Vis Waterzooi (seafood stew), Gebakken kip met Kersenbier (sautéed chicken with cherries and beer), Schilders Pallet van Aardappelpuree (three-layered potatoes), Aple [sic] Gameal Lasange (apple and shrimp lasagna salad), and a dessert of Brusselese roompudding (three-layer pudding). To add a touch of class, the dining center brought in a piano for music and adorned each table with candles.

It’s been a while since the campus saw a high-profile guest chef such as Lefevre join us, but, with a newly-renovated student center and an ever-more-involved dining service, perhaps we will see the revival of this program in the future, especially if students and the Food Committee petition in its favor.

This installment was planned as the last of a three-part series on campus dining. I have purposely focused entirely on ACDC in this piece, despite the advent of the Retreat in the most decades of Vassar history, thanks to a generous offer from Ken Oldehoff, Associate Director of the Retreat, who has revealed that he has in his possession several binders of historical material, including recipes dating back to the 1920’s from the campus bake shop. I look forward to exploring these sources, consulting a number of other sources brought to my attention in Special Collections, and discussing the College’s efforts to provide an alternative venue for dining when I turn to a brief overview of the creation and current state of the Retreat next week.

(I’ll also spend some space talking about the facility’s little-known, one-time connection to, believe it or not, Dunkin Donuts.)