When I started to write this blog post, my home was still without power from a pre-Halloween snowstorm. I was not alone: more than half of the households in the Amherst area were without power. In fact, the significant snowfall from the past weekend’s strong Nor’easter will likely go down in the record books as a historic event. Thousands of roads were closed and tree limbs and wires had fallen on cars and houses. We had nearly a foot of snow in town, and it was heavy and wet. But the most striking part of the storm was how unexpected it was: we went from raking the leaves to shoveling snow, all in one day.

Although it’s easy to take electricity for granted, all it takes is a power failure to remind us how much we depend on it. Life would be very different without electricity: no heat, no hot showers, no refrigeration, no computers, and no lights. Luckily, we had power on campus, and thanks to the Physical Plant, there was enough voltage available to support the university’s electrical needs.

Whenever there is a storm and the university is closed, the Dining Commons tends to be busier than usual. This time, it was even more hectic. We had a natural disaster on our hands. We not only served students but also people from the local community who joined us for dinner because they didn’t have power at home. Since the Sunday after the storm, we served more than 75,000 students and guests. Yet despite the snow, most of our staff showed up for work. They are heroes.

What made the timing of the storm even more challenging was that our annual Trick or Treat Halloween Lobster Dinner was scheduled for October 31st. It is always one of our most popular nights, so we went ahead with plans even though there were extra guests and a staff shortage.

Then came a phone call from the Dean of Students Office asking if we could also accommodate the off-campus students who didn’t have meal plans. Our answer was Yes. We offered free meals at all our DCs to students without meal plans. We wanted to alleviate some of the hardship of students living off campus without power by providing nourishment, and we also wanted to build community.

We provided free meals for three days. The off-campus students whom I talked to were overwhelmingly appreciative of the kindness shown to them, and they were very grateful to join their fellow students at the DCs. We ended up serving more than 8,000 students who didn’t have meal plans. Some of these students have never been to a DC. We welcomed them to join us and share our resources. And perhaps, after experiencing the food and hospitality, some will return as regular customers.

This is Ken Toong. Thank you for keeping UMass Dining at the top.

Contact Ken at ktoong@mail.aux.umass.edu

You can follow Ken Toong on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/KenToong

We love to see parents visit our campus, and we are always eager to show them our dining program. It is one of the reasons that we implemented a family dining program five years ago. Any family member who visits a student on a meal plan eats for free. It is always a good thing when our parents dine with their students and experience our award-winning dining program. (After all, they are often the ones paying the bills, and saving them the cost of a meal during their visit is the least we can do.)

But there’s more to the program than free food: we also want to build a bond with parents. We do so in other ways, too. Our Taste of Home program, in which we make recipes from students’ families, is a big hit. Each year, we receive more than 200 recipes from parents. Many of these recipes represent our students’ favorite home-cooked meals; others are treasures that go back two or three generations. From this program, we also create the Taste of Home cookbook, now in its fourth edition. Each year, we produce more than 5,000 copies of the cookbook, which is popular with parents.

Last week, during Family Weekend at UMass, we had even more opportunities to meet parents. Family Weekend is an event on campus for visiting parents and their students. We participated by featuring dishes prepared from nearly fifty family recipes. I enjoyed every one that I tried. (I also lost count of how many samples I tasted.) The food from the recipes was not only delicious but also healthy. Most of the recipes also used wholesome ingredients—even the Mac ‘n Cheese was made from scratch.

I had the pleasure of meeting some of the parents at Worcester DC who sent us their recipes. They were so excited to see their recipes on the menu. I asked whether we followed their recipes accurately, but they assured me we were doing just fine. One parent even preferred our version to hers.

Most of all, Family Weekend is a great opportunity to demonstrate to UMass parents the quality of the food we serve. Even though it’s hard to match home cooking, we give it a good college effort—at every meal.

This is Ken Toong. Thank you for keeping UMass Dining at the top.

Contact Ken at ktoong@mail.aux.umass.edu

You can follow Ken Toong on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/KenToong

We love to see parents visit our campus, and we are always eager to show them our dining program. It is one of the reasons that we implemented a family dining program five years ago. Any family member who visits a student on a meal plan eats for free. It is always a good thing when our parents dine with their students and experience our award-winning dining program. (After all, they are often the ones paying the bills, and saving them the cost of a meal during their visit is the least we can do.)
But there’s more to the program than free food: we also want to build a bond with parents. We do so in other ways, too. Our Taste of Home program, in which we make recipes from students’ families, is a big hit. Each year, we receive more than 200 recipes from parents. Many of these recipes represent our students’ favorite home-cooked meals; others are treasures that go back two or three generations. From this program, we also create the Taste of Home cookbook, now in its fourth edition. Each year, we produce more than 5,000 copies of the cookbook, which is popular with parents.
Last week, during Family Weekend at UMass, we had even more opportunities to meet parents. Family Weekend is an event on campus for visiting parents and their students. We participated by featuring dishes prepared from nearly fifty family recipes. I enjoyed every one that I tried. (I also lost count of how many samples I tasted.) The food from the recipes was not only delicious but also healthy. Most of the recipes also used wholesome ingredients—even the Mac ‘n Cheese was made from scratch.
I had the pleasure of meeting some of the parents at Worcester DC who sent us their recipes. They were so excited to see their recipes on the menu. I asked whether we followed their recipes accurately, but they assured me we were doing just fine. One parent even preferred our version to hers.
Most of all, Family Weekend is a great opportunity to demonstrate to UMass parents the quality of the food we serve. Even though it’s hard to match home cooking, we give it a good college effort—at every meal.
This is Ken Toong. Thank you for keeping UMass Dining at the top.
Contact Ken at ktoong@mail.aux.umass.edu
You can follow Ken Toong on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/KenToong

Recently, I attended the dedication ceremony of the Franklin DC Permaculture Garden. I was joined by more than 250 others, from students and guests to Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet. Permaculture, a sustainable land-use design based on ecological and biological principles, takes patterns from nature and mimics them. It also can support the cultivation of fruits and vegetables. But because it is modeled after nature, a working permaculture garden is not only sustainable but also easy to maintain.

Getting it started, however, was no small task. With its mission statement, “From grass to food in under one year,” the UMass permaculture project involved 500 college and K12 students. Working together, they transformed a quarter acre of grassy lawn outside the Franklin Dining Commons into a permaculture garden.

Here are some amazing numbers:

– Nearly 100 students, faculty, Amherst community members, permaculture designers, and other specialists arrived on a Saturday last spring for a workshop to discuss permaculture at UMass and share ideas. Talk about passion and community building.
–The project involved 500,000 pounds of compost—spread by hand
–Volunteers planted more than 1000 edible plants.

Here’s how the project started:

More than a year ago, several students, including Ryan Harb, who now works for Auxiliary Services as a sustainability specialist, proposed turning the Franklin DC lawn into an ecologically sensitive garden. Since it would give the students eating at the DC an opportunity to watch the garden grow, I thought it was a great idea. I had no idea that it would involve quite so much work or so many volunteers.

After several meetings with students and help from the Physical Plant, the campus department that maintains our grounds, we started the undertaking. To enrich the soil, we added minerals and mixed in compost, cardboard from our kitchen, and wood chips from the Physical Plant. (It was the three R’s—reduce, reuse, recycle—at their best.) Then in March we held a Permaculture Garden Design Workshop, which we opened up to the larger Amherst community.

The dedication ceremony, a culmination of more than a year of work, was a rewarding and emotional experience. Chancellor Holub thanked the students and staff for creating one of the first permaculture gardens at a large public university. He also attested to the great flavor of garden’s cherry tomatoes. Frances Moore Lappé, who in addition to being an author is also an anti-hunger activist, presented an inspiring speech about sustainable food sources. And Ryan Harb praised the student volunteers, especially since the project was, essentially, a grassroots movement. He proudly proclaimed that UMass was one of the first and most successful large operations in the country to regenerate underutilized land and turn it into food.
The permaculture garden project has indeed been a worthy cause. At Auxiliary Services, we have a responsibility that goes beyond serving good food, and we were glad we could support student sustainability efforts and contribute to this movement. The garden also complements UMass Dining’s dedication to local farmers and sustainability. We need to provide an educational component whenever possible for our customers and to enhance campus life. This project has been an ideal way to show how students and different departments can come together to do well by doing good.

My heartfelt thanks to Megan, Nathan and Ryan; they are the true champions of the permaculture garden and their dedication and passion for the cause is second to none. If you want to learn more about UMass Permaculture, visit their blog:

http://umasspermaculture.wordpress.com/

This is Ken Toong. Thank you for keeping UMass Dining at the top.

Contact Ken at ktoong@mail.aux.umass.edu

You can follow Ken Toong on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/KenToong

Beginning this fall, Baby Berk, UMass’s first and very own food truck named after our famed Berkshire Dining Commons, is traveling to popular campus destinations to serve food closer to the action.

Food trucks aren’t exactly a new idea. Warm-weather countries in Latin America and Southeast Asia have used them for years selling classic street food fare. Taco trucks have also been mainstays in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area for nearly as long. Yet it wasn’t until 2008 that an enterprising L.A. chef named Roy Choi added a few twists to the art of providing mobile food to the masses.

First, he offered a culinary novelty that you couldn’t get anywhere else. Second, he used Twitter to tell people where to find him.

Roy Choi and his Kogi BBQ truck sparked a fanatical following, and a slew of other gourmet food trucks have been popping up ever since across the country serving everything from gourmet grilled cheese to samosas. Now we have our own truck on campus.

UMass is not the first university to deploy a food truck. Both the University of Washington in Seattle and the Rhode Island School of Design have trucks serving students. Some schools work with outside vendors who drive their trucks to campus and charge a fee. What makes the UMass food truck unique is that we started the program from scratch with the input from students and staff. It took almost a year to get it off the ground, starting with the planning and finishing with wrapping the truck with catchy graphics. Meanwhile, our executive chef, Willie Sng, and our director of retail dining, David Eichstaedt, worked together with staff to design the menu and train the staff.

We want the food served from the truck to be fresh, fast and reasonably priced. We also want to keep sustainability in mind. Everything is made on-site and the service is impeccable. Since the food truck is mainly on campus, we are planning to change the menu every three months or so to keep the food interesting.

So, what are we serving now? Gourmet burgers using all-natural beef from New England topped with local cheeses and vegetables. To make it even more exciting, students suggested we should name each burger after the name or theme of each dining commons and even the Bluewall to reflect the specialty. So far, the burgers are selling well. Baby Berk is the most popular and the others are not far behind. There might even be a burger war going on…

Our customers love our signature burgers and want us to move Baby Berk to be near them. We are still working on determining the prime locations, so please send us your suggestions. And look for Baby Berk a corner near you!  www.twitter.com/UMassBabyBerk

This is Ken Toong and thank you for keeping UMass Dining at the top.

Duff Goldman (right), pastry chef and television personality.

On this September 11, the 10^thanniversary of 9/11, my flight home was delayed. It was a strange feeling to travel that day and think back to when I was fortunate to be safe in my office when the tragedy occured. While waiting in the airport, I couldn’t help but think about what we can do as a community to improve, to become stronger and healthier. These ideas were very much on my mind after attending the Flavor, Quality, and American Menus leadership retreat, a thought-provoking conference for volume-foodservice professionals.

The Culinary Institute of America (CIA) and the University of California, Davis, co-hosted the annual conference held at the CIA’s Greystone campus in St. Helena, California—the heart of the Napa Valley. Despite the picturesque surroundings, the objective of the conference was work, not sight-seeing. We were taking a hard look at areas affecting volume foodservice, particularly sustainability initiatives, regional menu trends, and the need to help our consumers meet the dietary guidelines put forth in new MyPlate recommendations. The audience for this retreat comprised 35 professionals from a variety of backgrounds, including chain restaurants, campus dining, and contract foodservice operations. Presentations came from leaders from the CIA and UC Davis, guest chefs from U.S. cities with “hot” food scenes, and regional food writers. It was an intense but productive three-day conference that began each day at 7:30 a.m. (sharp) and finished at 6:30 p.m.

Some of the trends and ideas discussed:

- We want authenticity: consumers care about where their food comes from and how it is prepared.

- More than half of us reject processed foods. According to an American Grocery study, 53% of customers are trying to buy as many natural foods as possible.

- We belong to local communities of eaters. Trends such as food trucks, farm-to-table menus, in-house butchery efforts, and neighborhood markets foster relationships with food producers.

- We are the world. By 2050, the global population will increase by one third to 9 billion, adding tremendous pressure on global food demands. In preparation, we need to transform food and agriculture policy to meet the challenges of the future.

- Sustainability “seasons” the food service industry. As global population grows, the demand for sustainable food sources will continue to grow, with significant environment and social impacts.

- Food service operators need to develop strategies to double consumer fruit and vegetable consumption to support the 2010 MyPlate guidelines.

- Costs and profit are not equally weighted in foodservice. While profit is the major concern of chain operators, campus dining operations tend to put students first.

At the conference, attendees concluded that we all need to provide more freshly prepared foods that still have great flavor with fewer processed ingredients. We need to provide servings in which half the plate comprises fruits and vegetables. We also need to serve everything in the most sustainable manner we can. It might be a tall order, but at UMass Dining we are up for the challenge.

This is Ken Toong. Thank you for keeping UMass Dining at the top.

Contact Ken at ktoong@mail.aux.umass.edu

You can follow Ken Toong on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/KenToong