Dining Halls Plan Substitute Entrees; Early Lunches to Be Offered in Union

Upperclassmen with 12 o'clock classes will be able to eat in the Union from 11:45 a.m. to 12 noon beginning with lunch Jan. 6, and after that date Central Kitchen dining halls will offer "acceptable meat substitutes" for their less popular dinner entrees.

The two major changes in Dining Hall Department policy, worked out at a Wednesday meeting of Administration officials and the HCUA Dining Hall Committee, have been given final University approval. They were announced yesterday by C. Graham Hurlburt, Jr., director of the department.

"The 1 o'clock jam-up in the Houses has been one of the chief dining hall problems this year," commented Sanford J. Ungar '66, chairman of the HCUA group. Ungar said that opening the Union for the short period before noon should allow many upperclassmen to attend noon classes without being delayed in the 1 o'clock lines.

Hurlburt noted that although the congestion problem has been particularly acute in the Houses on Mondays. Wednesdays and Fridays, the Union will be open early at lunch every weekday for the new interhouse plan.

The plan to supply meat substitutes for such dishes as yeal, lamb, stew and ham is based on a policy already in effect in Quincy House, where it has proven economically feasible because that dining hall serves uniform portions of all items.

An HCUA study made last spring in the Quincy, Adams, Eliot and Winthrop dining halls revealed that the amount of food wasted because returned on trays was twice as great in the Central Kitchen as in those with their own kitchens. Eliot and Winthrop, the HCUA learned, were serving food in varying amounts.

Hurlburt and Unger indicated yesterday that uniform portions from Central Kitchen serving lines would save enough money there to make such extra features as the substitutes possible within the present budgets.

Hurlburt emphasized that the department is also trying to keep the board rate stable: "The seniors graduating this June will never have had a board increase, and I can't think of any other college around here what there situation has been true."