Breakfast in Bed

The method of operation and the edible products of the Central Kitchen have been a perennial subject of undergraduate protest. Now that board rates are scheduled to rise again next year, a brief look at the assumptions underlying Dining Hall economics is definitely in order.

Key to the calculus for meeting food costs is the College regulation that undergraduates in residence must sign up for twenty-one meals a week, to be paid for at a flat rate. This method of assessing board charges accords with neither the realities of meal attendance or any canons of elemental fairness.

On its face, the existing board schedule presupposes that every undergraduate attends every meal. This fiction is far from the case, as the politburo of the Central Kitchen openly admits in its standing contention that savings on missed breakfasts permit better main meals. Yet one clear objection can be raised against this compulsory twenty-one meal system: that it is unfair to make students pay for meals they do not attend. Next year's rise in board rates makes this traditional argument even more justifiable.

Equally traditional is the official rebuttal that changes in assessing board costs could only make food production more costly and less efficient. Yet this contention remains to be legitimized, since no alternative system has yet been tried, at least in the memory of current undergraduate gastronomists. Certainly recognition should be given to the Central Kitchen's need for some uniformity in board payments, but whether the existing method is the most efficient or most just is clearly open to question.

One possible liberalization could take the form of allowing the student to sign up for a smaller number of weekly meals if he wishes, to be taken at any time or to conform to his own class or sleeping schedule. The sure-winners in Lehman Hall could even profit from levying a small premium on the student who subscribes to such a program in the expectation of a much larger saving on meals he never eats anyway.

Other conceivable adjustments could be made in administering a revised board plan, such as allowing reductions only to juniors and seniors, or to scholarship students. But whatever the form of such a trial yardstick, the University should now make some effort to re-examine the utility and fairness of its board rates.