Monday and Tuesday were mainly spent in meetings with the dietitian, lead cooks, kitchen and production managers about the fall menus for each dining hall and each shift. It was interesting to listen to the production concerns about menu planning, mainly having enough labor and time to prepare menu items. Taking their concerns into consideration, Dustin and I had to go back after each meeting and make a few changes to the menus, but overall things were received well. The soup menu for the Squires dining hall was not quite finished before we met with their staff on Tuesday, so we got their input on what they would like to see. Since their facility is not open on the weekends, we had to menu plan for their Mondays to be less labor intensive. As far as the soup menu goes, that generally meant that they could only make one homemade soup on Mondays (they have 2 each day the rest of the week) and that it should be a broth-based soup which is easier to make. Using their suggestions, I was able to plan out the rest of their soup rotation for fall.
On Monday evening, the executive chef, Greg Gefroh, was having a Chef's Table event for about 20-25 residence hall directors and apartment directors, where he did a cooking demonstration and fed them a very nice 5-course meal. I got to do a short presentation at the beginning about the nutrition education lessons I have made for a community nutrition intern to present in residence halls in the fall. I passed out copies of the rough draft of the handout for the first lesson to all of the hall directors there and talked a little about each lesson and asked if they had any feedback about nutrition education topics they'd like to see. I was a bit nervous about standing up and talking, but I think I did okay -- I know they were really all there to eat good food! Hopefully they will promote the education sessions to RAs and help spread the word that nutrition education is available at UND.
On Tuesday afternoon I got to interview several people at the UND Dining Administration office. I've never fully understood the role of administrators, so it was rather eye-opening to see the variety of roles each job fills there. I got to speak with Lola Conley, who does payroll and is involved with hiring and payroll paperwork training for dining services. Interestingly, up until recently she was called on as backup if a dining center was ever short-staffed -- though she told me the only thing she won't do there is cook hot food!
Then I got to interview Orlynn Rosaasen, who is the Director of dining services. His role is more of setting the direction for the department, and getting everyone to buy into its vision and mission. He also has a primary role of negotiating contracts with their primary vendor and with their vending contracts. At UND, all residence hall students are required to have a board plan in the dining halls (but it is optional to live in the residence halls, even for freshmen), and interestingly Orlynn shared that he has had some parents of students get a doctor's note saying their child medically cannot eat in the dining halls. However, after Orlynn pointed out to them that UND has a full-time registered dietitian on staff who can personally arrange any dietary needs with the student, all of the parents have been willing to work with them. It really highlighted for me how important a dietitian's role in college foodservice is, and how the director pulls everything together and solves problems.
I also got to speak with dining services' accountant, Lynette Franks. Lynette's main role is monitoring their board plan rates, and making sure that their expenses are met even though food costs and other factors can be highly variable. I am not a math person so I highly respect the job she does! She also talked about how each dining services unit is treated as a separate account to see how they are faring, but that all of dining services should be working together to achieve the goals of the department, and not trying to compete with each other. I thought it was interesting, I have noticed that there is some competition between dining halls, but didn't think that it would translate to financial competition -- especially when they are required to have their pricing the same across all units.
I also got to stop by the Old Main Marketplace on Tuesday and took some pictures of their Guiding Stars nutritional displays and the nutritional information stickers they have printed on retail salads, yogurts and fruits. Dustin the dietitian here at UND is going to a FoodPro conference out in California next week, and will be doing several presentations about the work he does here at UND. The pictures will be for a presentation he does on nutrition information in retail settings. It was interesting to see some of the information provided, the pita chips and hummus that they sell said on the package that it has 649 calories! I thought that was rather high so I pointed it out to Dustin, and we double-checked the nutritional information for the hummus. Turns out that it was a little higher than it should have been, so we got that fixed.
Wednesday was my day out at the USDA Human Nutrition Research Center! I got to spend the day shadowing their chief dietitian, Bonnie Hoverson. Bonnie and everyone of the staff I met there were incredibly nice and showed me around the facility. Just inside the door I was greeted with a huge ChooseMyPlate poster:
Wonder if I could use that for the UND nutrition education sessions?
Throughout the day I got to see different areas of the building. They were originally geared towards micronutrient research, and did a lot of studies on selenium, copper, zinc, etc. Recently, their studies have shifted towards obesity research because of the needs of the country.
In the morning I got to meet with Angie, their main database dietitian who works with their own proprietary software that uses both the USDA Nutrient Database for Standard Reference and the FNDDS (Food and Nutrient Database). She works with all of their research subjects who have to do dietary recalls, food logs, diet histories, etc. and gets all of that information logged into their database. It was really interesting talking to her about how she got involved in working in research -- it really got me thinking about my future and the possibility of me trying to get involved more in research too.
Then I got a nice little tour of their body measurement lab by their exercise physiologist Bill. They have a lot of equipment similar to the CRC at Ohio State, like a BodPod, a DEXA scanner, and indirect calorimeters. They have a large poster on one wall of the lab showing the DEXA scans of four different individuals all with a BMI of 24.2 -- slightly above normal range -- but the DEXA also determines percent body fat. The percent body fat in these individuals varied from 19% at the lowest to over 40% at the highest, all from the same BMI! It was a really good portrayal of the fact that BMI really does not tell the whole story about a person's body composition. One of the pieces of equipment they had that I hadn't seen before was a very nice bioelectrical impedance machine:
Bioelectrical impedance uses the body's water to conduct a small electrical current. Using the idea that water conducts electricity and fat does not, it then can be used to calculate a person's fat free mass (lean mass) and fat mass. However, BIA can be very difficult to use because so many factors can change the amount of body water in a person (and there really is no "normal" amount of body water for a person). I think I could've talked to Bill all day about the equipment they use there and the advantages, disadvantages and difficulties of each one. Perhaps I should look into exercise physiology instead?
The day I was visiting there, they had a couple of engineers from Minnesota at the facility to speak about smartphone technology and how it can be used for nutrition research. Before lunch I got to sit through a session where one of the engineers spoke about not only smartphone technology, but also about how he can build mobile direct calorimeters and use them rather than relying on indirect calorimetry. There are very few direct calorimeters left because they take so much money to run and a dedicated facility, but the idea that they could be made into mobile facilities was interesting. Most of the rest of the talk was focused on smartphone technology and up and coming developments in nutritional assessment through pictures, accelerometers and other capabilities. Not having a smartphone myself (I know, I must be one of the last people in the world without one!) it was interesting to see how quickly the technology is expanding. In the afternoon I also got to sit in on a chalk talk where the researchers at the facility started discussing research project ideas with the engineers, using the smartphone technologies!
After lunch I got the rest of my tour with Bonnie. I got to see the two kitchens they use there for research studies, and got to peek into a couple of their labs. One of the main studies they are currently doing there is with the US Army, testing diets with different levels of protein and their effect on calcium levels and bone health. They are using a safe calcium isotope to help measure calcium loss in the study participants. Interestingly, Bonnie told me that the calcium isotope is acidic, so they have to use a very small amount mixed in milk to provide it to participants, otherwise it curdles the milk!
On the top floor of the facility, they have a nurse's station and rooms to house up to 14 people (only 13 are currently in use) for live-in research studies. The protein study with the Army is a partial live-in study, meaning that the participants live there but are allowed to leave to go to classes during the day and are on their honor not to eat anything other than what is provided to them through the study. The rooms they stay in are pretty nice!
This one was a spare room that had some extra equipment in it, but each room also has a desk and a bathroom. The bathroom has a refrigerator in it for collecting urine specimens, but there is a separate door for researchers to get things out without having to go into the bathrooms. The study participants can also use common areas while living there, they have a pool table, a piano and a nice reading area among other things. Their normal lounge was converted into a blood draw station for this study though -- not quite like a hotel or resort, but almost!
One of the projects Bonnie is working on right now is to come up with 6 "plates" showing regional Midwestern dishes using the MyPlate concept. She has a lot of cookbooks and recipes, trying to capture different cultures and farming commodities. It sounded like a monumental task to me, hopefully we will get to see the finished product online in the future.
I truly had a great time at the USDA Human Nutrition Research Center in Grand Forks, I can't thank Bonnie and her staff enough for letting me spend the day with them and showing me around. Maybe I have a future in research somewhere?
Thursday and Friday this week were back to menu planning and interviews. On Thursday afternoon I got to interview Cindy Spencer, Director of Res Life and Education, and Judy Sargent, the Director of Resident Services. They are both great people to talk to, and it was very interesting to get to learn more about the housing side of services at UND. Cindy is an incredibly caring person who coordinates all of the residence hall staffing and provides guidance and leadership for all of the students who work there. She shared so many stories of things she has seen, that were both sad and touching. She also serves as the person to call in a crisis or emergency in the residence halls, in addition to providing leadership and supervision in her department.
Judy Sargent reminded me a great deal of my advisor back home at Ohio State, the director of the School of Allied Med. Judy talked with me a lot about her role there and the various projects that she oversees, particularly in how they have tried to involve IT in the housing experience at UND and all of the planning that goes into each project. She also shared with me her background in working with non-traditional students in apartment housing and helping them get two playground projects approved and installed. I really appreciated that she was an advocate for non-traditional students finding success in college and in trying to make their living experience a positive one at UND. As a non-traditional student myself, I have seen that returning to college can be a daunting and difficult process where you can feel out of place, and not many administrators seem to stick up for the non-traditional student.
On Friday I got to experience the confusion that is menu planning for all of the retail locations that are served out of the Terrace dining hall, including the Twamley Snack Bar, Airport, and the Med School Food Cart. I got to plan the soup rotation for their fall menu at each location, following the requests of each area but trying to match it with the soups that Terrace is already producing, before entering them all into FoodPro. I definitely have a new appreciation for Dustin's job as a dietitian, I don't know how he keeps all of these menus sorted out!
I only have two more weeks left here in North Dakota, it's hard to believe time has flown by so quickly! I am so thankful to have gotten this opportunity to learn about so many different aspects of college foodservice and the role of a dietitian in this setting. It will be interesting to see what these last two weeks bring!
Hi, I hope that I could contact you for some questions. Would you mind? I'd love to speak with you.
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