A Baseline for Consistency: Admitted Students Day Food at Mather

Leon Hu’ 29

Opinion Editor

On Sunday, April 12, we had the opportunity to welcome our next class of Bantams to campus for the typical admitted students day experience. Overall, it was a fantastic day that did a brilliant job of showing incoming students what the best of Trinity has to offer. I’m excited to see how the Class of 2030 will contribute to the College.

Still, I am also curious about how the College will contribute to us. With the weekend gone, Trinity is still struggling with the same issues as ever: poor condition of residence halls, an antiquated AC system and, notably, food. The college made no effort to resolve the former issues during the Welcome Weekend — understandably so, given the scale of such changes — yet they managed to address the latter. On Sunday, May 12, Mather had possibly its best offerings for the entirety of this academic year. 

For a day, we had it all — every station open on a Sunday, with pastrami, grilled chicken, sushi, two grill stations and more. On the whole, the food was a noticeable step up from the typical offerings at Mather, and it managed to create a rare sense of approval among the student body. Mather temporarily was viewed as a boon, not a burden, to the Trinity experience, something normally unheard of.

So why don’t we have this every day? Obviously, we cannot regularly have the other glitzier elements of the Welcome Weekend, like the food trucks. This is just about Mather: simply put, why do we not invest the resources to outfit Mather in this manner every day? Why shouldn’t we invest more into our only dining hall to make it more consistent?

Anecdotally, one of the main issues with Mather appears to be its inconsistency. There are certain items that are generally favored, like brisket, chicken parm sandwiches and grilled chicken, but these are not always there. More specifically, a lot of students do not view the other food offerings to be as consistent in quality with the more favored offerings. Combined with the relative lack of open stations on weekends, certain days at Mather are generally well-received, and others are not. Unfortunately, the latter is what defines our school’s poor reputation for dining.

But as the Welcome Weekend proved, we are capable of putting out high-quality food across all of our stations. In fact, when the need arises, we are also capable of opening an array of options, even on a weekend. We are able to overcome the obstacles in inconsistent offerings by focusing on what the students know to be great. We can have good, consistent food at Mather — just like during Welcome Weekend.

The cost, obviously, is resources. Opening a station for a single day is hours of work for multiple staff members, and opening every station on a weekend means forcing dozens of our staff to clock in on a weekend during the prime hours of the day. Yet, this is still a matter of resources. With our current resources towards dining, we likely cannot support this level of culinary variety, especially during the weekends. And such a change should never come at the expense of the staff to make it possible. With more resources towards dining, including more staff, however, this could change. 

If we begin to invest in dining, we could begin to address the inconsistency of Mather, one of the hardest sells to incoming students. There is a reason why admitted students days are when the college decides to put maximal resources into dining — Mather is something that needs to be sold to prospective students to get them to attend. Still, what is more important than selling Mather to prospective students is maintaining the status of Mather for existing students to improve the true Trinity experience that incoming students are promised.

It is time for us to change. Hiring more dining staff to keep stations open without sacrificing the pay of our existing workers could allow for more days like the Welcome Weekend, where most, if not all, stations could be open to give students the freedom to choose the food they want to. Putting more resources into improving the consistency of the food, not just single items, would instantly make Mather more appealing to the student body. Better than a single evening of a high-end meal is a small boost in quality and variety to every meal offered, regardless of the day. 

Ultimately, we have already begun to work towards this. Slowly but surely, the offerings at Mather are getting a little more diverse. The quality of this year’s Welcome Weekend food is miles ahead of what I tasted my Welcome Weekend a year prior. Now, we just need to continue; we need to use the Weekend as an example of what we can be, and we need to actualize that vision.