Every day, thousands of students flood IU’s dining halls to fuel up for another day of learning. Indiana University has six “all-you-care-to-eat” dining locations, and three main chefs design the menus and handle day-to-day operations.
Many students may never consider how their meals get in front of them, and the process is no simple undertaking.
Sourcing IU Dining’s food
According to IU’s Executive Chef, David Tallent, there are three main vendors for the dining hall food, and one source with close ties to campus.
The produce for the dining halls comes from Piazza Produce, which is based in Indianapolis. General wares and dry goods come from Gordon Food Service, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. IU Dining also has strong ties with Fischer Farms in Jasper, Indiana. Fischer Farms supplies the majority of the beef and pork utilized in recipes.
Although it once was able to contribute more to the dining halls, IU Campus Farm is still recovering from the impacts of COVID-19 but has been providing vegetables to Forest Dining Hall this semester. According to Jennifer Piurek, executive director for the Campus Auxiliary Experience, when the semester began, IU Campus Farm sold IU Dining heirloom tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, zucchini, okra, bell peppers, green beans and green onion.
Chef de Cuisine Jack Henniger, chef for the Southeast Neighborhood, used these vegetables and created a vegetable stir fry, BLTs, fresh tomato salsa, slow roasted tomato sauce and pizza toppings.
How does IU Dining create its menus?
Henniger and the other two chefs de cuisine, Zak Kell for the Central Neighborhood and Darren Worth for the Northwest Neighborhood, create their menus for the dining hall locations alongside Tallent and dieticians.
“They choose the recipes that they want to use,” Tallent said. “If they want to create new recipes, they have full reign to do that.”
According to Piurek, food allergy safety is a major priority at IU. Using Nutrislice, students can filter out their allergies, diets and other restrictions to find what meals at McNutt Dining Hall, Collins Eatery, Goodbody Eatery and Forest Dining Hall are safe for them.
“Every time that a recipe is created, there's a whole huge back end process with our dietitians, and they have this team of six or seven interns, and they spend hours entering all this nutrition information, because food allergy safety is really important to us at IU and we have been recognized for taking that seriously,” Piurek said.
At some dining concepts, like Heartland, Tallent said, they try to limit any of the top nine allergens that they can. Heartland serves comfort foods of the Midwest and can be found at Forest Dining Hall and McNutt Dining Hall. According to Tallent, they especially try to limit sesame, tree nuts and soy in their recipes.
Each semester, both head chefs and sous chefs at the dining locations are given the opportunity to host pop-up dining experiences.
“Last night at Forest, Chef Rockett, he did something that reminded him of having dinner with his grandma,” Tallent said. “He did brisket, baked potatoes, beer cheese and he’s from southern Indiana, so really kind of homestyle. It was his chance to be the chef.”
According to Tallent, the themed meals are an opportunity for the chefs who feed students all day, every day to be able to cook “their” food.
According to the Inclusive Dining Newsletter from IU Dining, the area manager for residential dining, Ashley Massie, created the sous chef pop-up series to change up what students usually get to eat and give sous chefs the chance to showcase their talent and love for cooking.
Each of these chefs has full control of their chosen theme and menu. In January, sous chef Salamon Mathews created a Hawaiian meal inspired by his heritage. This meal included “kalua pork, huli huli chicken, macaroni salad, sticky rice and sweet and sour vegetables,” according to the newsletter.
Not only are sous chefs given their chance to add their own personal flair to IU Dining, but the Student Meal Plan Committee, with representatives from each residence hall, the IU Student Government and Union Board, meet with campus dining leadership bi-weekly to discuss how to better cater to the students on campus who frequent any of IU’s Dining locations.
One example of their input, according to Tallent, was the desire for plant-based milks.
“We have more vegan and vegetarian than ever,” Tallent said. “I think a lot of that comes from those students and their voices and their input.”
Future plans and initiatives
In the future, IU’s campus dining has goals to further their sustainability initiatives and expand its ReusePass program. Already at Collins Eatery and Read Dining Hall, IU has begun to implement ReusePass reusable to-go containers that are returned within three days of checking out using a QR code. The goal is to limit single use to-go containers, limit waste, save water and avoid greenhouse gas emissions.
In the future, Tallent would like to expand on the ReusePass program and implement more local vendors.
“We are certainly going to continue to push sustainability areas that we’ve been working with and trying to work with our vendors to get them to think more locally,” Tallent said. “Not all produce has to come from California or Mexico, but maybe think a little closer to home and make our carbon footprint a little bit less and support more farmers.”
Along with this, IU Dining and Hospitality and IU Sustainability applied for a $75,220 grant from the Indiana Department of Environmental Management’s Community Recycling Grant Program for a food waste dehydrator.
According to Tallent, this dehydrator is meant to limit wasting food after it's been put on students’ plates. The food that students don’t eat usually ends up in trash bags, Tallent said.
“This food dehydrator should hopefully help us shrink that and maybe make it manageable,” he said.
After dehydration, the food would become compost, reducing food waste volume by 90%, according to Piurek.
Tallent said he is also working with Fischer Farms to create a blended burger recipe with beef and mushrooms. The proportions would be about 80% beef and 20% mushroom and “would “lighten up on the protein and make it just a little more healthy and a little more sustainable.”
