For Hungry Thousands

This week has been a slack one for potatoes. The Central Kitchen, which serves all the Houses but Adams and Dunster, usually manages to send close to 10,000 pounds of them per week along the catacombs to its five dinning halls. This week the Kitchen used only 75 bags of poatoes, each weighing 100 pounds.

The man who buys the potatoes for the University's thousands can afford to order in hundreds of pounds. The man is William A. Heaman, supervisor of the Dining Hall Department, and his hundred-pound orders go out weekly from his office at 399 Harvard Street. Heaman buys his potatoes through a yearly contract with the F. J. Ward Company, but for all other commodities on the University menus, weekly contracts are let to wholesalers.

The Central Kitchen handles 16,000 pounds of meat a week, which includes items like 3700 pounds of boneless beef tops, 2200 pounds of mutton legs, 1900 pounds of fowl, 17000 pounds of chicken fryers, and 350 pounds of sausage meat.

Heaman's office incorporates this typical order from the Central Kitchen with similar ones from Adams and Dunster Houses, the freshman Union, Harkness Commons, and the Medical School. Boston meat packers then bid for contracts on Heaman's specific orders. The contracts go to the lowest bidder, and the whole process repeats itself a week later.

Vegetables, fish, and fruit also fall into the weekly contract system, but commodities like milk, coffee, and eggs are ordered daily by the individual units--Adams House or the Union, for example. These orders require Heaman's confirmation but do not go through his office.

Menus are at the discretion of the dining hall units, subject to Heaman's approval, and the menu requirements are incorporated into the weekly orders by his office.

The Central Kitchen, largest dining hall unit in the University, is under the supervision of Heaman's assistant, Carle T. Tucker. From his office under Kirkland House Tucker also controls the Eliot Grill, the House Refreshment Agency, and the Society of Fellows Dining Hall in Eliot House. Tucker also has some administrative supervision over the College Bakery, although for the most part it is an independent unit.At the entrance to the Central Kitchen, a delivery man stacks a crateful of vegetables on the hand-truck that will take them into storage.