A Dining Hall Where Students Sneak In
 

May 10, 2006 / The New York Times

A Dining Hall Where Students Sneak In
By ALISON LEIGH COWAN

NEW HAVEN, May 9 - The pizza is made from organic flour. The burgers are made from grass-fed lamb and freshly picked mint. The seasonal offerings this spring include chicken brodo with pasta and greens and pork loin with fennel. And don't forget the roasted asparagus.

 This is the menu at the dining hall for students at Berkeley College at Yale University, where the scent of fresh, delicious food - homegrown greens and pasture-raised beef - has been drawing students from around the campus, much as the scent of the black-and-white cat lures the amorous cartoon skunk Pepé Le Pew.

 Non-Berkeley students try to sneak in the back door. 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. Some even scavenge trays of half-eaten food, pretending that they have already been there and only have seconds on their minds.

"Whatever they can get away with," said Catherine Jones, the dining hall's executive chef, sympathetically.

But only the 425 students assigned to Berkeley College, their guests and a few others are allowed into the well-appointed Gothic hall. That means the rest of Yale's 4,800 students, those assigned to the 11 other residential colleges, are mostly picking from the same old nonorganic salad bars, scooping out the sugary cereals, and chewing on chuck-patty hamburgers slipped into white-bread rolls.

 The dining hall is the outgrowth of Yale's Sustainable Food Project, which was started to support area farmers and promote healthier eating by serving mostly locally produced, seasonal crops and organic ingredients.

 If the meals were merely high-minded, the experiment might have been short-lived. But they have won over those who want good food only if it tastes good, too.

 The hostess at last Wednesday's lunch, Annette Tracey, volunteered that the students call her the "Berkeley Bouncer," as she turned away two sophomores, almost to prove the point.

 One sophomore who made it past her desk, Sarah Milby of Newark, Del., said she was gratified that her regular dining hall has been closed all year for renovations. That allows her to vie for the few extra slots that Berkeley saves for walk-ins from her college.

Still, she is tired of playing the odds and is considering starting a petition to recommend taking Berkeley's approach campuswide. "It's obvious the students want it," she said.

 Those without any shame plead with the hostess. "If you stand there and look disappointed enough, she'll take your card and swipe it," said Patricia Herrmann, a senior, who got in fair and square on Wednesday as a guest.

Yale officials credit Alice Waters, the innovative chef from Berkeley, Calif., for dreaming up the sustainable food project four years ago when her daughter Fanny became a freshman at Yale and they discovered the steam tables.

 Early on, the like-minded people Ms. Waters recruited to get the project off the ground turned a vacant lot into a lush vegetable garden that doubles as their laboratory and helps students "get their hands dirty," said Melina Shannon-DiPietro, an associate director of the project. The group also oversaw a composting experiment to see if students would pitch in by scraping their plates.

 The three-meal-a-day rollout came in September 2003, just in time to make sure that hundreds of tailgaters at that year's home Harvard-Yale football game feasted on grass-fed burgers and organic beer.

 The ever-changing menu reflects Ms. Waters's philosophy 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. She also advocates using organic ingredients and production methods that keep the environment sound.

 On Friday, she said she would still like to see the approach become "part of the experience of every child who goes to Yale."

 At Yale, the project's two associate directors, Josh Viertel and Ms. Shannon-DiPietro, both 27 and friends from their Harvard undergraduate days, try not to be doctrinaire.

 Students are offered fair-trade coffee - hoping to provide higher wages to the laborers who pick the beans - hormone-free and antibiotic-free milk from cows that are allowed to graze, and fresh-cut potato chips from organic potatoes grown in Connecticut.

 But diners can also gorge on Hershey's chocolate syrup, sodas and sports drinks. "There'd be a rebellion if they ran out of blue Gatorade," Ms. Herrmann said.

 Mr. Viertel, who worked as a shepherd and farmer before coming to Yale, said the philosophy is to add rather than to take away. "We don't want students to feel that eating well is suffering," he said.

 Of course, there are adjustments.

 Tori Truscheit, a Berkeley College resident, said she now grasps how quickly the growing season for corn and tomatoes fades "when it's winter and you're eating squash all the time."

 As part of an effort to capture tastes from the warm months year-round, Ms. Shannon-DiPietro has lined up a New Haven food-processing company that is turning tomatoes into salsa that students can munch with chips next winter.

 Knowing the farmers personally, she and her colleagues were also able to find a garlic supplier with an easy-to-peel variety for the sake of the kitchen staff, who had been told to stop using the jarred kind.

 Sometimes the program's organizers have faced competing goals. They debated, for instance, whether to buy organic avocados from California, but settled against using avocados altogether because they are grown outside New England.

 Program exceptions were made for bananas and coffee, because students expected them with breakfast.

 As popular as Berkeley's food is, Yale officials noted that it costs the university about 50 percent more than standard fare. "The real question is, how far is the university willing to go with this?" Mr. Viertel said.

 Ms. Waters said she understands that "real food costs more," but neglecting health and the environment also has a price. She said that the pursuit of "fast, cheap and easy" foods was "destroying our culture."

 As a start, along with the occasional Berkeley culinary creation, Yale's other dining halls now stock organic milk and granola freshly made using honey and maple syrup.

 "Students ask for this recipe with their diplomas," Ms. Shannon-DiPietro said.


         Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company