Food Tasters Tour Houses To Better Cuisine, Service

The problems of Overseers' visiting committees are normally great but in the case of at least one such group they are gastronomical.

University dining halls usually serve some 16,000 meals a day, and the job of reporting on this mass-produced cuisine falls to the 22-members Visiting Committee on Kitchens and Dining Rooms. The group, as far as anyone knows, is the only one of its kind in an American university. This week the committee held its monthly meeting in Adams House.

Appropriately enough, 20 of the committee's members are women, and all of them have sons currently attending the College.

Both male members are restauranteurs--Andrew S. Seiler (Seiler's, Wellesley) and Richard Treadway (Treadway Inns) One of the women, Mrs. John R. Abbot is a trained dietician.

The rest of the committee is non-professional, but this is not to say that the ladies confine themselves to exchanging recipes.

What the committee does is to split into twos and eat at the various dining halls three times a month, receive student gripes and suggestions, and look for things that need improvement. They make notes on the menus offered the days they visit without warning.

Cowie May be Center

Among the suggestions implemented by last year's committee report were pop-up toasters and tenderizing machines for steaks. One suggestion of the report that was not adopted was an experimental kitchen to test new recipes and provide uniform standards in all the dining halls. If the plan were accepted menus would remain diversified as they are now, but the meat pies would taste the same in all dining rooms.

This recommendation will probably be repeated in the forthcoming report, with Cowie Hall at the Business School as the possible location of the testing bureau.

One of the most frequent student complaints, according to committee members, is the necessity of paying for the meals a week.

In answer, the committee points out that if students were given the option of eating 14 meals in the dining halls each week, the basic charge would have to be increased.

Food Here Good

By and large, the committee agrees in praising the food at the University. All take pride in pointing out the unlimited portions offered in the dining halls--a distinction in which Harvard is "virtuously unchallenged."

At any rate, if you should see a woman eating breakfast in your dining hall some morning, it will most likely be a member of the visiting committee trying to discover how eating can be made more popular here.