Building a Better Dining Hall
Stanford-led collaborative aims to show students how food can be tasty and healthful.
By Diana Aguilera
Would you notice a difference between an all-beef meatball and one that was 40 percent mushrooms? How about 50 or 60 percent mushrooms? Which one would taste best?
A group of academic researchers and chefs is asking these kinds of questions using university dining halls as living laboratories.
The Menus of Change University Research Collaborative, a joint effort between Stanford University and the Culinary Institute of America, aims to help students ditch processed foods in favor of healthier yet flavorful plant-based meals.
“I don’t think there’s anything else like it. I haven’t seen any other space where you have researchers, operators, students and chefs working together,” says Stanford Dining executive director Eric Montell, who co-directs the collaborative with professor of medicine Christopher Gardner. Members of the group hail from more than 40 universities and colleges, including Harvard, University of North Texas and University of Washington.
One of the collaborative’s main priorities is reducing red meat consumption by using the “protein flip”: ample portions of veggies and grains accompanied by smaller portions of animal protein. With that in mind, Stanford has created a Flavor Lab at the Arrillaga Family Dining Commons. Here, chefs experiment to create tasty food that’s local, fresh and seasonal. They aim to show students what food is supposed to taste like, how individual ingredients affect flavors and why different cooking methods yield different results.
A few steps away, in the dining hall itself, student researchers set up tables earlier this year as part of a five-college taste test. They offered student diners a set of meatballs made up of different ratios of blended beef with mushrooms, and asked those who sampled the meatballs to take a quick survey about their preferences. Although the results are still forthcoming, the hypothesis is that students will favor the blended options rather than the pure beef because the mixture will be moister and more flavorful. In the future, the researchers plan to test different beef mixtures in recipes including carne asada tacos and condiment-laden burgers.
‘I don’t think there’s anything else like it. I haven’t seen any other space where you have researchers, operators, students and chefs working together.’
“Students are really leading the project,” says Cindy Shih, MS ’17, the lead coordinator at Stanford for the meatball study. “They were designing the study. They set up the tables, they distribute surveys, and they interact with their peers to get them to participate. They get to work with the chefs and talk about what is actually happening behind the scenes, whereas previously they might just bring a plate up and grab some food.”
The collaborative hopes first to have a measurable impact on the college food system, then on institutional food settings generally and, ultimately, on the country’s eating habits. “In order to impact the food system, you have to go back to who’s growing what food, and to change that, you have to change demand so that you’ll change supply,” says Gardner, a professor at the Stanford Prevention Research Center. “If we can change university food and scale it across the U.S., we could possibly change the broken food system.” After all, Gardner says, most students “will be parents and raise kids with a better palate, more food literacy.” Plus, a few of today’s students could influence eating habits well beyond their own dinner tables, or even their corporate cafeterias: “They’ll soon be the CEOs of the next Google and Facebook.” •
