College kids eat better than ever, but few work in cafeterias nowadays

Those weight-conscious college coeds who insisted on making messy diet "TaB floats" in the hard-to-clean milk glasses ticked off us drones in the Sargent Hall basement dish room the most. If we were in bad moods because of the oppressive heat and pesky cockroaches, we might even just break a glass, instead of cleaning it. Reaching into our arsenal of dirty ice cubes from discarded soft drinks, we'd chuck a frozen projectile (generally reserved for cockroaches) at the offending glass as it came down the dumbwaiter on a tray packed with dirty dishes for us to clean.

A Northwestern University classmate, who now lives in Wheaton, once was punished by being forced to spend a Saturday riding up and down that dark dumbwaiter, using a brush to scrub years of caked-on spilled food off the walls.

The clean dishes, baked dry in a massive industrial dishwasher, were so hot, freshmen sometimes wore winter gloves to protect their hands. My dish room mentor (now a doctor in Ohio) could grab four piping hot plates between the fingers in each bare hand and stack them in the clean rack without flinching.

Still, the dish room was a promotion from my first college job as "beverage boy," where I had to hoist heavy milk cartons into place, change the carbon dioxide and syrup cylinders for soft drinks, mop up spills and keep track of inventory and quitting time for my full-time adult coworker who couldn't read or tell time.

"We still employ some students on campus, but not as many as in the past," says Paul Komelasky, the district manager for Sodexo, the food company that runs the cafeterias, convenience stores and other food outlets on the Northwestern University campus in Evanston.

"They are just too busy and don't want to do what you and I did in the old days," says Komelasky, a Mundelein resident who spent many college hours in a dish room.

That's not all that's changed.

The dish room at Sargent is upstairs now - clean, airy and staffed by union professionals. (I didn't see one cockroach.) "Trayless dining" is encouraged in every dining room and mandatory in a couple. Going without trays saves the energy to wash them, cuts down on wasted food, and even helps students avoid putting on those extra pounds known as "the freshman 15," Komelasky says.

The food has changed, too. As Komelasky guides me through the campus dining rooms, convenience stores, cafes and kitchens, he points out the diversity of the "nuCuisine" menus.

"Our students are much more sophisticated in global tastes," Komelasky says, noting offerings from locally grown organic produce to sushi to vegetarian polenta to quinoa to falafel to fair-trade coffee and a host of specialty items in addition to the usual pizza, pasta and burgers.

Northwestern has a vegan station and was voted the most vegetarian-friendly college by the youth program at PETA. With a dietitian on staff, campus dining includes menus for those with diabetes or allergies to peanuts, shellfish, gluten and dairy, as well as a kosher kitchen and halal meat for those with religious concerns.

For those few students (about 30) who do work in the campus food program, the jobs pay for their meal plans.

"With my current hours, I'll make something like $4,000 per school year - only the most-minute dent in N.U.'s tuition ($35,064) this year - but I'm getting more than money out of this," e-mails Izzy Boncimino, an 18-year-old freshman journalism major who spent five years of her childhood in Arlington Heights. "I'm learning how to fit in my school work and sports around the schedule I've committed to at Lisa's (a late-night cafe on campus)."

Generally working from 10 p.m. until 2 a.m. on weekends, Boncimino says she's met "tons of new people," learned "how to deal with people in a working environment," and figured out how to "spend wisely and go without extra things."

"I know their value in work hours," Boncimino writes, noting that "one box of Cheerios equals 40 minutes working the sandwich bar."

Or about as long as it takes to clean dried ice cream and TaB foam out of two small milk glasses.