With the post-finals slow down already begun, I had the chance this afternoon to spend some time just poking around on the shelves. In a box labeled “Ad Hoc Committees” I discovered a cache of papers from the previously unknown to me “Committee on Food Service.” The most compelling file in this group contained menus from the 1980s. Here we have breakfast, lunch and dinner during the week before Christmas break, 1983:
It looks basically ok (although I do wonder about a lunch of corn dogs and brussel sprouts) but execution is everything in this area.
Just for fun, here are the meal plans on offer at the time:
Bonus: The weather here has been very strange all week. There’s been some sort of miasma hanging over us–grey, cloudy and clammy, almost drippy, with temperatures that were neither warm nor cold. Today it got colder but the sun finally came out. It was wonderful.
Actually, it was the week before break in 1982, based on the calendar and the notation at the top. It looked very familiar. Our favorite dinners were fried shrimp and steak. With fried shrimp, they usually had extra, so if you were fast, your table could get seconds. It seemed like there were other things where seconds were available (I remember a pretty decent cream of chicken casserole with chicken, rice, almonds, veggies, and lots of melted cheese), but most meals weren’t good enough for seconds. I can’t say I remember corn dogs and brussel sprouts, but I think I usually just had a sandwich at lunch. As I recall, my usual breakfast was a cheese omelet, which wasn’t bad, or cheese eggs, which were mass produced, and good when running late. So, dinner was about the only time you didn’t have a choice. As I recall, some people declared themselves to be vegetarian just to avoid some of the weird dinner entrees.
I look at the food today, and it’s just amazing the choices. I think they might have introduced a salad bar my senior year, but it might have been the next year. That was considered to be a major change.
What, no cheese eggs for breakfast? That’s a travesty. I knew guys who’d get up to wolf down a heaping helping of cheese eggs and then return to their rooms and leap into the arms of Morpheus. They needed their beauty rest more than they needed to attend class. Well, who knows, but that’s what they thought.
C Kelly, this one made me laugh. Many thanks!
Yep. Ate this stuff a lot.
I’m pretty sure that 84-85 was the first year that multiple meal plan options were offered. Before then, everyone on-campus paid for 19 meals/week.
Cheese eggs were available every morning. For those who got up in time, breakfast was the best meal offered in the Colleges, because some things, like eggs, were prepared to order there in the commons.