The Future of Cafeteria Food

If you have gone to school, worked in an office, factory, or other large workplace, you’ve probably eaten — and hated — your fair share of institutional cooking. I still remember the name of the food service company that ran the cafeteria where I went to college, and I would still revile it, except it deserves partial credit for forcing me to learn how to cook.

Yet I have seen the future of cafeteria food, and it is bright.
This particular story begins at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York. I visited its cafeteria on one of the Meatless Mondays instituted by Sodexo, one of the big-three food service companies in the country. Despite Sodexo’s claim to be “the world leader in quality of daily life solutions” — that’s really saying something! — I didn’t expect the food to be great, and indeed it wasn’t.

But it was better than I’d expected, and Meatless Monday was more than just hype: the company was clearly promoting healthy options in general, and meatless ones in particular. More important, the meatless dishes brought new thought and vigor — maybe even inspiration — to the menu, which in general was about what you’d imagine. Since then, Sodexo has expanded the Meatless Monday program to 2,000 locations, including Toyota and the Department of the Interior.

I have some issues with Meatless Mondays, a campaign developed at Johns Hopkins, because too many dishes that might have once featured meat contain prodigious amounts of cheese. (Portobello mushrooms are also in abundance, and that’s a great thing.) This substitution of cheese for meat isn’t universal, but it occurs frequently enough so that the main message is lost. The way to follow a diet that’s more sustainable for both body and planet is through eating plants and unprocessed food rather than animal products and ultra-processed food; substituting a cheese-heavy sandwich on white bread may send a somewhat beneficial “eat-less-meat” message, but it doesn’t send the same one as a salad or a vegetable stir-fry. Nor does it do you or anyone else any good.

An even better model is the Bon Appétit Management Company, a food service operation that’s part of the Compass Group. (Compass also owns Restaurant Associates, which runs the cafeteria at The Times.) I’ve visited three of Bon Appetit’s 400 locations in recent months, the “cafés” at the University of San Francisco (twice), Roger Williams University (in Bristol, RI) and one of their several locations at the University of Pennsylvania. While the last of these three was a small, nearly intimate scene — presumably making it less of a challenge to produce its astonishingly appealing food — the other two are sizable, serving upwards of 55,000 meals a week.

Bon Appétit Management Company, the brainchild of Fedele Bauccio, who founded the company in 1987 after a long career in food service, has gotten a fair share of well-deserved positive publicity. The chefs (and even the cooks, many of whom prepare the food they serve) have broad, independent powers, the food is locally sourced whenever possible and the company has committed — not just given lip service to — sustainable seafood, cage-free eggs, fair labor practices, antibiotic-free meat (when possible), a reduced carbon footprint in general, and a huge proportion of not only vegetarian but vegan options (their use of cheese has actually declined in recent years, a company-wide goal).

Furthermore, they do real, from-scratch cooking — no “bases” are used for stocks or sauces, soups, salad dressings and salsas are made from scratch, and even much of the lemon juice is fresh-squeezed. At one operation, the yogurt is made on premises. At Roger Williams, Rhode Island-grown potatoes are peeled and cut for frying, which puts the café ahead of many of the country’s top restaurants. (If you’re going to eat fries, this is the way to go.)

This is cafeteria food that you actually want to eat, food that deserves to be served with wine. At each of these operations, I ate from the same line as the students, and sampled a fantastic vegetarian muffaletta sandwich, vegetable-stuffed crepes, Indian “burritos” with spinach and tofu, tacos more reminiscent of Los Angeles than New York, stir-fries made to order and in-season, from-the-farm asparagus, turnips, lettuce, herbs and more. I can only imagine how good these cafeterias are come July.

I sat with the chefs at all three cafés, and I found them committed to showing customers a better way to eat. They’re demonstrating that mass-produced and mass-served food can in fact be real food. Bon Appétit does not share many of its numbers, but we can assume that while real ingredients costs less, preparing them costs more.

This is in general true of real cooking: you spend less on ingredients, because you’re not buying “value-added” junk — but you have to work a bit harder. To have this happen in the cafeteria, one of the most despised of all American institutions, is downright inspiring.

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