By Donna Hemmila

In the days of mystery-meat school cafeterias, dishing up 30,000 student meals a day may have been a lot easier than the challenges today's campus chefs face. But not as much fun.

"Students are well-traveled, and they have good palates," said Chuck Davies, associate director of residential dining and executive chef at UC Berkeley. "Most of what we do is driven by student requests."

Berkeley students can submit comment cards about their dining preferences. Typical requests include things like "more vegan options," "not enough fish," "too much fish."

When students started requesting more organic foods, Davies and a team of UC Berkeley residential dining staff set in motion a project that would make university culinary history.

In April 2006, Cal Dining became the first U.S. university kitchen to be certified organic. Three years later, the Cal organic salad bars – stocked with fresh produce, tofu and organic salad dressings from an alumni-founded company – are among the most popular campus food attractions.

Davies, who had worked for a natural food store chain in Seattle before joining the university, decided that it wasn't enough to just start offering organic choices. He wanted to take the extra step of seeking certification from CCOF, a nonprofit organic certifier based in Santa Cruz. The process took a year. After granting certification, CCOF continues to audit the purchasing invoices and inspect the kitchens to make sure the campus is maintaining its organic status. And the green dining options continue to grow.

"We're fortunate to be in an area where so much organic produce is available," said Davies. And the volume of food purchased from sustainable local farms helps keep the cost down.

Cal Dining highlights the multi-ethnic makeup of the campus with a variety of Asian and Indian foods along with student favorites like mac and cheese and pizza and plenty of vegetarian and vegan options. Theme meals are big for holidays: dessert buffets on Valentine’s Day and soul food for black history month. The campus chefs work with four chef consultants to kick the dishes up a notch.

"The chefs actually go look at what students are throwing away," said Davies. "They can tell what's a hit and what's not."

The number of faculty, staff and students living off campus who buy meal plans has been growing, he said, due to big quality improvements after Cal Dining Director Shawn LaPean arrived in 2003.

"This year we're selling 2,600 non-resident meal plans," Davies said. "Previously we'd sell about 100 in a year."

Cal Dining is also getting more of the campus catering business and provides food service for the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
 
Mark Chekal-Bain, community relations director at the Berkeley Lab, said he eats at the Cal Dining-run lab cafeteria two or three times a week.

"Everyone loves Taco Salad Tuesday," he said. "The salad bar is fabulous. It's fresh, and it's a reasonable price. It's a good deal."

Davies, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in New York, is also a French-trained pastry chef. He has worked in hotel and restaurant kitchens, but cooking at Cal is his dream job. He proudly displays in his office a gold medal he and a team of Cal chefs won in a university dining cook-off. (They beat Harvard.) In 2007, Cal Dining won a prestigious Ivy Award from Restaurants & Institutions magazine.

The Cal Dining mission is to deliver a satisfying culinary experience along with the calories.

"When you consider students living in campus housing, they eat with us every day," Davies said. "It's like going to the same restaurant every day."

Donna Hemmila is editor of Our University.