Fall 2012 Survey Results & Welcome to the Winter Menu

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In late October, 2,945 undergraduates or House affiliates completed Harvard University Dining Services (HUDS) residential dining satisfaction survey. This represents roughly a 44% response rate, assuring results that should be strongly representative of the overall community.

Total respondent breakdown:

• Freshman – 33.3%
• Sophomore – 25.1%
• Junior – 18.6%
• Senior – 18.2%
• Other (not undergrad) – 4.8%

Respondents self-identified with the following dietary preferences:

• I am an omnivore (I eat any kind of protein)  – 71.3%
• I exclude some, but not all meat (i.e. don't eat pork or beef or some other animal protein) – 13.3%
• I am a pescaterian (I eat seafood but no meat) – 4.3%
• I am a vegetarian (no beef, chicken, turkey, or seafood/fish products) – 6.5%
• I am a vegan (no meat or dairy) – 1.0%
• I keep kosher – 0.8%
• I keep Halal – 0.4%
• Other – 2.4%

Survey participants selected Brazilian Barbecue for the festive meal on Sunday, February 24, but support for Greekfest was also strong so HUDS has invited guest chef Diane Kochilas back in the spring for further food fun, including an entirely Greek-themed dinner.

HUDS benchmarks its program in areas of food and menu, service, and “concerns” year over year, using these categories to drive continuous improvement, but also to identify problem areas in individual operations or overall.

Every dining location received the results from its specific community feedback, and has been using that information to make local adjustments – to condiments, spices, equipment temps, etc.

At an overall level, scores are compared to those over the last several Falls, and are as follows:

 

In particular, we note significant change in evaluation of the “concerns” categories. We attribute this largely to the recent implementation of new menu cards. Additional comments positively note the new menu cards’ added information on food sources, ingredients, and wellness potential. Some respondents suggest that menu cards also display calorie and serving size information. This feedback is noted, but HUDS determined, with the support of a broad committee of students and residential and health professionals to continue to provide that information only on HUDS’ website, where it proves less challenging for individuals with eating disorders.

Additional comments noted periodic innaccuracies in the cards – items labeled as Vegetarian when they appear Vegan, incomplete ingredients, etc. In these cases, students are encouraged to point this out either to their managers or through the feedback system. With several hundred items a day on the menu, we are grateful for additional, helpful monitoring of information and will correct it immediately.

Feedback regarding new menu items was able to be integrated into the winter menu, which starts on Wednesday, November 28. We used to start the winter menu after winter break, but based on student feedback determined you need that variety to start sooner. Recommendations for new menu items included the following (with HUDS notes in parantheses immediately following:

• Avocados/guacamole (exploring this as an occassional option for the salad bar – avocados are very expensive, so we hope, when they begin their season in March, to be able to offer them periodically)
• Asparagus (exploring this as an occassional option for the spring menu – asparagus is very expensive, and is mostly harvested in April, so we hope to be able to offer it periodically then)
• Beef or steak (will appear on the winter menu, such as in steak with pepper sauce and roast sirloin)
• Cheesecake (appearing on the winter menu)
• Congo bars (appearing on the winter menu)
• Enchiladas (will explore for the spring menu)
• Fish – not fried (appearing on the winter menu)
• Fresh Fruit (we continually monitor seasonal availability and try to bring in new things as quality and affordability allow)
• Greek yogurt (continue to monitor pricing and bulk availability)
• Grilled salmon (appearing on the winter menu)
• Gyros (will appear as a make-your-own station on the spring menu)
• Indian food (during the winter, one Friday night World Cuisine will be Indian)
• Korean Barbecue (appearing on the winter menu)
• Lasagna – meat and vegetarian (appearing on the winter menu)
• Mac & Cheese (appearing on the winter menu)
• Nutella (continue to monitor pricing and bulk availability)
• Pad Thai – a more authentic tasting version (we will examine the recipe. Authentic pad thai includes several allrgens, which we have avoided, but may need to bring back to make the taste “truer”)
• Potstickers/dumplings (appearing on the winter menu)
• Sushi (hard to buy a quality product at the volume we need and a price we can afford)
• Tortellini or ravioli (appearing on the winter menu)

A number of comments also centered on the following areas:

• A number of entrees could easily become vegan if they replaced butter with something like olive oil – our chef is examing this, please continue to call out such opportunities when you see them
• A number of entrees could become healthier (especially among vegetarian options) if cheese or cream were eliminated or on the side – again, our chef is exploring opportunities for this change
• Some items seem salty, especially soup – in the past 18 months, HUDS has reduced sodium in its entire menu by 25%, including soup. That said, as people continue to reduce sodium, they taste it more and more. We’ll keep modifying recipes as tastes change to take advantage of this opportunity to improve pverall health. As we like to note, one can always add salt, but they can’t take it away. It’s a great, positive statement about our national taste that this is a welcome change.
• Brain Break could use some healthier options – coming your way with the new specials over the winter!

Thanks to our community for participating in this vital survey process, which lets us adjust course and make positive changes to the menu and services. Keep sharing your feedback – in person, online, on Facebook, or through Twitter.

Welcome Back!

Over the summer, your menu enjoyed a bit of a makeover. Our culinary team has introduced great new recipes and menu items – everything from homemade deli salads at the sandwich bar (made in-house with no additives or preservatives, which also makes them gluten free), complemented by a freshly baked bread, to several new Friday World Cuisine themes, including South American, Southeast Asian, Tex-Mex and New England menus.

Some other highlights: every day at lunch we’ll feature a hot sandwich, in addition to entrees. We now feature a whole grain station, where you can enjoy whole grain Barilla-plus pasta, a hot grain such as quinoa, wheatberries or wild rice, and complementing sauces. And we’ve added a number of tasty new entrees, like Vegetarian Loco Moco (a play on a Hawaiian street food), to Curried Chicken with Coconut Milk, Swordfish Tacos and Korean Pork Stir-fry.



And now, by popular demand, we're also featuring soy milk as a regular beverage option.

We’ve also made changes to the bag meal program (don’t forget: order online from the undergraduate section of the website - www.dining.harvard.edu - by 4am for same-day pick-up) in response to your feedback. Bag meals now feature better ingredients, more healthy choices and gluten-free options.

The Make-Your-Own Station this fall is Crepes - both sweet and savory - on Monday nights. Make it your meal or your dessert – or both! – from the ingredients offered, or get creative with dining hall staples.

Finally, we’ll continue to feature some favorite additions from last year:
Fruit bar on Tuesday nights
Pre-made salads on Thursday nights
Bread bar on Sunday nights

We’re looking forward to a great new year!

Residential Dining Spring 2012 Satisfaction Survey Summary

• 1,996 respondents
•  75% are omnivores
•  Of non-vegetarians, 44% eat vegetarian 3 or more times weekly

• Overall satisfaction: 3.87

• In line with satisfaction for the last five years (which peaked at 3.96 and has been as low as 3.46)
• Satisfaction in Food, Service and Concerns categories remains fairly level (see charts that follow), though a few areas, when combined with respondent comments, reveal key areas on which HUDS will work more extensively over the summer:

o   Menu taste, variety & freshness

o   Cleanliness of plates & utensils

o   Health/nutrition concerns around food

•  A “scoring of key customer service areas revealed the following:

o   When there's a checker on duty, are you greeted warmly? 94% yes

o   When you place a grill order, are your interactions with the grill cook helpful/friendly? 94% yes

o   Are your grill orders made quickly and accurately? 88% yes

o   Are menu items replenished quickly during mealtime? 89% yes

o   Are serving lines still fully stocked if you come in at 6:45pm? 78% yes

o   Do you feel comfortable asking the staff for something if you don't see it? 88% yes

o   When you order a bag meal, is it completed accurately? 87% yes

• Best practices in each area will be identified and rolled out to all units
• Key themes of open ended comments:

o   Healthy options are much in demand. While students have guilty favorites, they do want to make healthy choices and are interested in seeing less fried food, cheese, and sauces or heavy preparations. They’re looking for many and varied fruits and vegetables, lean proteins, and grains. They view less processed foods as being more nutritious. They eat with their eyes first, and look for colorful, fresh foods as first guides to making healthful selections. 

o   Fruits and vegetables are much in demand – in greater variety and creative preparation. They want a rainbow of colors, and foods prepared with an emphasis on taste, making it more interesting and therefore inspiring to eat healthy.

o   Many acknowledge that HUDS has made significant positive moves this year with the addition or premade salads, the Tuesday fruit bar, and new vegetarian offerings. They just want more of this.

o   What they want less of: oil and butter on vegetables; chicken; unauthentic ethnic foods.

o   What they want more of: interesting ice cream flavors on Sundays; nutrition and allergy cues on menu cards; Korean barbecue; alternative vegetarian proteins like seitan and beans; red meat and fish; greek yogurt; cohesive menus at a given meal.

o   Many pointed to an opportunity to reduce the number of items offered in favor of providing better quality, freshness and variety of what is on display.

• All the above will be utilized and considered in the seasonal cycle menu revisions already underway.

Lean Finely Textured Beef

In response to recent news about Lean Finely Textured Beef (also known as Pink Slime), Harvard University Dining Services (HUDS) has audited all menu items containing ground beef. Effective immediately, HUDS will not serve any meat that includes Lean Finely Textured Beef.

While this product is approved by the USDA, HUDS has elected to ban it from our menus to ensure our ground beef is of the highest quality.

Spring Seasonal Menu

There was some truly spring-like weather over the break, so we’re celebrating the new season with the launch of our Spring Seasonal menu in the undergraduate dining program.

Each year we make seasonal changes in keeping with the way our tastes change based on the weather, and to take advantage of ingredients growing locally.

The Winter seasonal menu received lots of compliments, so we’ve tried to take what you loved on that menu and bring it – if not in specific entrees at least in spirit – to the spring. As such you’ll enjoy:

• Two new Make-Your-Own stations. On Mondays we have an Asian-influenced Chop Chop salad; on Thursdays, we’ll feature a Crispy Fish Taco bar. (I know many of you have a deep love for the Korean Barbecue – it will be back next winter).
• Tuesday night’s Fruit Bar has been such a hit that we’ll keep it right where you’ve come to expect it.
• One of the recurring themes we hear is that you love it when we make special salads, already assembled. On Wednesdays and Fridays, we’ll institute that as a regular option. Wednesdays will include Fattoush, a Levantine salad made with toasted pieces of pita bread as well as greens and vegetables.
• And Friday nights will continue to serve Global Cuisines, starting this week with French, and following with Vietnamese, Thai & Mediterranean.

We continue to work on clearly defining for our vegetarian community a daily entrée. We’ve taste-tested and sample a range of options, some of which you’ll see this spring. You’ll also note that we’ve modified our online menu listing to call out the Vegetarian Entrée separately (just below the other entrees) at lunch and dinner. We hope this makes it easier to identify your options quickly.

A few other highlights based on your feedback:

• A new homemade fish cake recipe using local whitefish
• A new homemade chicken salad recipe at the deli
• Cheesecake for dessert (first appearing Tuesday, March 20)
• New Sweet Chills FroYo flavors (Cookies & Cream, Yellow Cake Batter, Dreamy Creamy Chocolate, Banana Cream Pie)
• And special menu features from the Mushroom Council and the Pork Board

Finally, spring offers some good reasons to celebrate. Coming up, we’ll have:

• Yardfest (mid-April)
• Earth Day dinner (April 19)
• Richardson’s Ice Cream Sundae Bash (may 3, at the start of Exams)
• And the Food Literacy Project’s Top Chef competition

Keep the feedback coming – here on the blog, online, at Facebook or Twitter, to your UC-appointed Dining Advisory Committee members, to your dining hall team, and on the Spring satisfaction survey. We’re listening!

Tamar Adler Visits

This coming Thursday, the Food Literacy Project is excited to welcome Tamar Adler to campus. Tamar Adler is a chef and food writer, most recently of An Everlasting Meal. She’s cooked all over the country, from Farm255 in Georgia to Prune in New York to Chez Panisse in Berkeley, and she is full of wisdom on how to cook economically and sustainably in the kitchen.

How to Boil Water: A Recipe for Simplifying Eating
March 1st, 4:00-6:00 PM
Tamar will be holding a cooking class on how to find your bearings in the kitchen. She will be demonstrating how to make the most of simple ingredients like bread, vegetables, eggs, and herbs, with recipes and techniques for soft-boiled eggs, salsa verde, and bringing bread back to life with garlic and salt.
Limited spaces! RSVP to louisa_denison@harvard.edu

The Origin and Future of Cooking: A Conversation with Richard Wrangham and Tamar Adler
March 1st, 6:30 PM
Cooking may have made us human, but how has our relationship to cooking changed in the twenty-first century? Tamar Adler and Richard Wrangham, professor and author of Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human, discuss the origins and future of cooking.

Undergraduates and House Afilliates may join the Food Literacy Project for an informal dinner conversation in the Strominger Room in Currier House. Get dinner in the dining hall and bring it to the conversation. Please RSVP to louisa_denison@harvard.edu

Two Traditional Tastes: Peking Chicken and Korean Barbecue

Every Monday and Wednesday night this winter, HUDS is serving mouthwatering, traditional Asian dishes in the Houses and Annenberg. While Monday-night Peking chicken is a brand new offering and Wednesday-night Korean barbeque is a time-honored student favorite, both dishes are on the menu this winter to give students a taste of delicious historical cuisines.

Peking chicken was introduced this winter in response to student feedback provided on a recent survey. The chicken is served with mu shu pancakes, hoisin sauce, chopped scallions, Peking-style tofu, and sliced cucumbers. Vegetarians can omit the chicken from the dish for a tasty meal, while vegans are encouraged to eat everything except the chicken and the mu shu pancakes.

Peking chicken is a variant of the traditional dish Peking duck, which has been prepared in China since the Yuan dynasty ruled in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries C.E., according to ABC’s wesbite. By the early fifteenth century, Chinese chefs had refined the flavor of the dish, which soon became a dish of choice among royalty in the Ming Dynasty, ABC’s website said.

Bejing chefs have traditionally prepared the dish by cooking the meat enough to blaze the skin, hanging the meat up to dry, and allowing the fat to drip to one side, according to Otto Y. Chang, who is the manager of Royal East Restaurant at 729 Main Street in Cambridge. Change said the dried meat is then roasted until it is crispy. The cooked meet is next sliced at an angle to create three layers of skin, fat, and meat, and then wrapped in a dry pancake to soak up the fat. In America, however, chefs remove the fat from the meat “to accommodate the American taste,” Chang said.

Korean beef barbeque was served by HUDS in Winter 2010, and has returned to the menu every winter ever since. This winter, we’re serving Korean barbeque with a twist by alternating between beef and pork versions of the dish each Wednesday night. We’re serving new pork Korean BBQ on Feb. 1, Feb. 15, and Feb. 29, and we’re offering classic beef Korean BBQ on Jan. 25, Feb. 8, Feb. 22, and Mar. 7. Both versions of the dish will be served with accompaniments of sticky rice, leaf lettuce, Korean pickled cucumber, chopped scallions, kimchee, and ssamjang sauce. The dish can be eaten without meat for a delicious vegan or vegetarian alternative.

Also known as bulgogi, or “fire-meat,” the dish dates back to dates back to the second and third centuries B.C.E., according to Professor of Korean cuisine Kim Yong-moon in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. Yong-moon told the WSJ that the Maek people who lived in southern Korea at that time first cooked a dish called maekjeok by skewering marinated meat over a fire.

A few centuries later, a more recognizable form of Korean barbeque emerged in the Koguryo Kingdom in Korea, according to the website of the Korean food company CJ. Although the dish saw a decline when vegetarian Buddhists took power in Korea, the Mongol invasions of Korea in the thirteenth century and the subsequent rise of the Chosun Dynasty restored Korean barbeque’s popularity, CJ’s website said.

Korean barbeque is traditionally prepared with very thin sliced ribeye beef marinated in a Korean soy sauce and oil, according to Ilsun Kwon, who is the manager of the restaurant Koreana at 158 Prospect Street in Cambridge. Kwon said that after marinating overnight, the beef is grilled and served with rice and bean paste sauce. The contents, she said, should be wrapped up, and eaten in a lettuce leaf. Kwon suggests eating the dish with sides of onions, mushrooms, green pepper, raw garlic, scallion salad, seaweed salad, bean sprouts, watercress, pickled radish, tofu, or fishcakes. According to Kwon, the best Korean barbeque has a sweetness that complements, but does not overwhelm, the taste of the beef.