An anonymous complaint — presumably from a Hillsdale student — inspired an unannounced visit to Saga from the health inspector this week, according to a Saga employee. Both the dining hall itself and A.J.’s Cafe were found up to code. The anonymous tipster can rest assured that his or her food is prepared safely.
What a happenstance we find ourselves in. In the same year our campus food service has beefed up its quality, a student organization seeks to change the entire system, as Chris McCaffery reports in the News section. When Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) compare Saga’s mandated meal plan with Obamacare, they ignore hard truths about the nature of contracted, private association.
YAF’s crusade is spearhead by complaints of the mandated meal plans and the food quality at the hands of SAGA.
It’s important to keep in mind that complaints about the mandate and quality of food cannot be separated. If the mandate is dropped, SAGA loses income and can do less with what they take in. As a business, the quality is often tied to income. If SAGA take a hit income wise, they take a hit with the level of quality they could produce.
Another link between the mandate and food quality can be found in the concept of economies of scale, or cost advantages due to large scale operations. The cost advantages of a large scale operation is difficult to achieve for any food provider. One of the main reasons almost every student must purchase a meal plan is due to that difficulty. SAGA has reached some level of cost advantage. They can make more off a salad they sell than I could if I went and bought the ingredients at a grocery store. However, their advantage is not enough to provide the whatever quality meal YAF is seeking.
YAF also asserts that students and their parents are best adept at making their own nutrition related decisions. This is hardly a revolutionary idea. At any given meal, hundreds of combinations create a balanced healthy meal and we as students come up with most of them. If even then, our nutritional needs are not being met, parents and doctors are involved to demonstrate need for specially prepared food. The variety students experience is only available due to the forethought of the food service to organize and prepare the foods to be put out. At any given meal, dozens of workers help improve the dining experience by keeping counters clean, wiping and re-wiping tables, stocking dishes, replacing food, the list goes on. On holidays, and yes, even opening day for the Tigers, extra planning and expense goes into festive meals that we wouldn’t have otherwise.
All three of these factors, plus the fact that the school only has 1400 students, create high costs that lower the profit margin and make it difficult for the increase in quality being called for by YAF and their supporters. To argue that we need only to find a new provider, inject some competition, neglects that the new provider would also face these factors in operations.
As already expressed about quality, it does exist in the dining hall. But much like it’s difficult to call the ingredients of peanut butter and jelly splayed on your counter “quality,” it’s difficult to call the myriad options downstairs worthy of Michelin stars. Taking any chance to apply economics, I’m going to invoke the information problem at this juncture. Food planners have very little idea of the exact cravings each one of us has at any given time. Their solution is to put out a few prepared meals and then give us free rein of a number of other food components to satisfy our wants.
Therefore, in the end, we make our own choices. We choose to come here. We choose to put up with cafeteria food for four years. We choose which meal plan is best for us. We choose what we eat every day. We can also choose to do something to change our current situation, which is what YAF so valiantly working on. Whether seeking change in such a manner is a wise choice has yet to be decided.
One last item of note: A few separate incidents with lettuce in A.J.’s and Saga have spurred fervent debate and straight-up whining. In response to that, I offer the fact that, in the A.J.’s case, the lettuce was delivered cut and washed from the supplier, as it is downstairs. This is contributed to the wonders of mass production, a process which is by no means free of mistakes. There’s up to an average of 60 or more insect fragments per 100 grams, according to The Food Defect Action Levels report by the FDA. At the same time, any other method of extracting lettuce for consumption is vulnerable to mistake. This makes arguing for a new food provider here on campus, well, fruitless. There’s no guarantee choosing a new provider would solve this problem. Our time is precious here, we are students first and foremost, and having someone else prepare most if not all of our meals is dividing the labor in such a way to help us excel in our occupation.
I say, let those who accuse falsely and fail to look at the whole picture, eat cake.