Rethink Dining: Chartwells Still Has No Place at Trinity

 Leon Hu ‘29

Opinion Editor

Contrary to popular sentiment on campus, I actually miss Mather when away from campus. As much as I love the food at home, I genuinely enjoy the food we have at Trinity — an opinion I’ve held since I arrived in the fall. My expectations were met when I arrived back from winter break. My meals at Mather this semester have been quite satisfying, just like the last semester. Nothing has changed.

However, that is precisely the problem. Nothing has changed. Last October, in the wake of Chartwells cutting staff hours, our dining staff held a week of vigorous protests, successfully forcing the provider to keep their hours as is. For now, the precarious balance holds, and our dining staff continue to work under the larger umbrella of Chartwells with the same hours as normal. Nonetheless, the same issues still remain. 

When I say I like the food at Trinity, I do not mean I like Chartwells. I mean I like the people who prepare our food and how they prepare it. While it is generally an unpopular opinion to like our food — just listen to what people say about the food at Mather during lunchtime — it is not an unpopular opinion to like our food service workers. There is not a single day where I do not see at least one heartfelt conversation between a Trinity student and a food service worker as they go about our days. There have been so many instances when I have seen students’ faces light up when they see their favorite dining hall worker manning the kiosk at the front that I’ve lost count. Many of these instances are followed with a conversation between students and workers so natural that it feels akin to that between close friends. Our dining staff are universally loved by the students.

Then, where is the disconnect? If our dining staff are so beloved, why is our food so hated? The likely answer is the same lingering issues that looms above the heads of every dining employee at our school: Chartwells. Chartwells is an active restraint on the culinary expression of our dining staff. The company, which manages over 350 college dining services across the country, encourages absolute homogeneity in the food it serves. Almost all of our stations (i.e. “Performance Kitchen,” “Delicious Without,” “Flour & Sauce,” and more) are identical to ones at other Chartwells-managed schools, like Connecticut College. Chartwells management has failed at even simple tasks, like providing students with consistent gluten-free meal options or accommodating for Muslim students during Ramadan. Pervasive issues with Chartwells at other schools have ranged from gaming meal prices to force usage of multiple meal passes at once to failing to feed quarantined students for entire days at a time. Here, with how Chartwells have treated our hardworking dining staff, the situation is not much better.

In that case, why do we still have them? In response to this past fall’s Chartwells-related dining walk-outs, President Dan Lugo told the Tripod that our administration has “no immediate power” to address the Chartwells situation. Unfortunately, this remains true. Our dining staff are contractually bound to Chartwells, not Trinity. The Trinity community loves them. Meanwhile, Chartwells does not. We need to change.  There have been numerous cases of colleges successfully transitioning away from external provider-based dining systems. Ithaca College switched to in-house dining in 2019. Meanwhile, although Southern Connecticut State University left Chartwells for another provider, almost all of their prior Chartwells-hired employees remained. Our students hate their food. Our staff are mistreated by their management. With a precedent in place for leaving the conglomerate-owned company in the past and the dawn of a new year, Trinity needs to sever ties with Chartwells and the commercialization of higher education it stands for. The exploitation of some of our college’s hardest-working members must end.