Amidst rapid supply chain issues and a commitment to minimizing environmental strain, the dining hall staff has been working hard to keep students satiated — efficiently providing food for 655 students, faculty, and their families.
According to the Director of Food Services Michael McCarthy, he and the department managers have a menu meeting every Thursday afternoon. Deerfield meals typically rotate on a five-week cycle in addition to seasonal and the most popular meals repeating, and the dining hall confirms meals three or four weeks in advance. Mr. McCarthy said, “When we go to do [a] menu [item] again, we look at what the statistics were, how much we made, how much was left over, and then we make decisions based on that data and information on how we’re going to do it the next time.” He added that this is further complicated by the fact that students’ food interests are constantly changing: this year, Deerfield is buying over 30% more rice than in 2021-2022 to keep up with demand.
However, gauging the school’s appetite by the number of portions consumed per student can be misleading because of food waste. According to Mr. McCarthy, even if just 100 students, or 15% of the student body, take an extra serving during a walk-through meal but throw it away, “[the Dining Hall] might run low, and then we will compensate for that.” This furthers the issue of food waste since they will buy more food and cook more meals but often students will only consume the same amount of food as last time; and, to make matters worse, as Mr. McCarthy noted, student behaviors tend to be highly unpredictable.
Moreover, according to Brad Woodward, Assistant Director of Food Services, students tend to take more food than they end up consuming. Interestingly, when Deerfield hosted the international student debate competition, Mr. Woodward observed, “It was very noticeable to me how much less food that group of students took than Deerfield students. On Saturday night, I saw one of the debate students go through the slider bar and got one slider, which is small, it is a little hamburger. And I do not think I have seen Deerfield students only take one slider. Normally, Deerfield students take four or five and only eat two or three of them, and the others just get wasted.” He said that he hopes the school will attempt to educate students about this avoidable issue.
Furthermore, Mr. Woodward and his crew try to source our meals from the most environmentally friendly sources. Obtaining chicken and beef locally is more challenging, but Mr. Woodward still tries to “source ground beef locally as we know that beef is very environmentally damaging to produce, [and] locally [sourced] beef is much better — it’s pastoral, so it has a much lower environmental impact.” Also, because it is more accessible, Deerfield “tries to source vegetables locally; for example, at this time, we get a lot of squash and potatoes locally.”
While producing waste is inevitable, Deerfield aims to recycle almost everything it utilizes. According to Mr. Woodward, the Dining Hall “[does] a program on Mondays called Second Helpings, where [it] contribute[s] food to a community meal that gets served in Greenfield.” Furthermore, Mr. Woodward mentioned that “everything that we cannot really utilize ends up being composted. So we put that in a dumpster, and that gets trucked up to a farm in Greenfield called Martin’s Farm. They compost the leftover food waste and scraps and any kinds of trimmings when we peel vegetables or fruits or clean meat or anything like that.” Most intriguing to the average Deerfield student is why, when they wonder about the lunch or dinner ahead, they are usually met with chicken. Mr. Woodward said, “A lot of it stems from sit-down meals. Finding meals that appeal to such a huge population at the same time, chicken is the easiest way to do that. And for various reasons, people tend to not eat pork or beef due to philosophical or dietary reasons.” In terms of the environment, he stressed, “Chicken, in terms of an animal protein, is less intensive on the environment compared to other proteins.”
Exploring the reasoning of Deerfield’s chicken craze illustrates the many factors — aside from simple preferences — that the Deerfield Dining Hall must take into consideration when planning out meals.