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Latest College Reading Lists: Menus With Pho and Lobster
As students’ palates grow more sophisticated and admissions become more competitive, many top colleges are making their dining halls more gourmet.
Brunswick, Me.
THE smell of a curried butternut squash soup wafts through the air as you walk into the dining room. At long tables of dark wood, beneath windows soaring 20 feet overhead, customers dine on vegetable ragout over polenta, spicy orange beef, Dijon-crusted chicken, cheese quesadillas, vegetarian pho —Vietnamese noodle soup — and spinach sautéed with garlic and olive oil.
If it weren’t for the trays, and the fact that most diners are under 25, you’d think it was a restaurant. But this is Thorne dining hall at Bowdoin College here.
As recently as 10 years ago, a typical campus dining experience was a cafeteria offering overcooked meat, canned vegetables and instant mashed potatoes.
But as palates grow more sophisticated and admissions become more competitive, many top colleges are paying attention to dining rooms as well as classrooms.
For students who are now hearing from the top-tier colleges, picking a destination can be partly a matter of taste.
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Justin Foster, a freshman from Memphis, was surprised at the variety and the quality he found at Bowdoin. “White spinach lasagna, eggplant parm, ratatouille, Honolulu tofu with rice and peppers, sweet potato fries,” he reeled off his favorite dishes, “and they make a really good rum cake, too. Vegans, vegetarians — the cooks make it easy for those students with that lifestyle, and I appreciate the food more, knowing they’re making a real effort to be green, to use organic food, to be environmentally friendly.”
Mrs. Kennedy said: “First, our cooks know how to cook. All of our soups are from scratch. We have Fair Trade coffee locally roasted. We have our own butcher who grinds the meat for our hamburgers, and 20 percent of our food budget is locally sourced.”
Bowdoin has two organic gardens, begun five years ago as a student project and now in the hands of a farm manager. Last year they supplied more than $20,000 of herbs and vegetables, with the surplus sold at an on-campus farmers’ market.
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The Web site www.collegeprowler.com, which has more than 180,000 visitors a month and publishes college guides, just named Bowdoin “School of the Year.”
“After the warm atmosphere and amazing faculty, students cited the food as their favorite thing about the college,” the site’s co-founder, Luke Skurman, said in an interview. “After I visited, I understood why.
Am I the only one here who would really like to go back to college? Forty years and three degrees later, I’d like to do the fun stuff this time.
My daughter the Diva, who is only in her early thirties, went to theater school at AADA in LA. Then she got an associate’s degree via community college, and now she’s back in school in North Carolina, working on a degree in special ed. She says it’s a little hard sometimes for her to be patient with the musings and attitudes of 18 year olds, and it makes her feel very old!
I sometimes think about how it might be nice to go back to school. But I’m so much older than the Diva already . . . and graduate school is full of people with professional aspirations. I grew up around academics, and I’m not sure I could take all the petty power trips and BS. I still do think about it, though.