After a year of college life in the U.S., making do with Bon Appétit’s occasional and mortifying excuse for Indian food, it was a breath of fresh air to walk into Stevie and find a genuinely tasty preparation of cauliflower and potatoes, with a side of chickpea curry (gobhi aloo ki sabzi and chole). AVI Fresh has swooped in to redeem my impression of college dining options. The problem with Bon Appétit was never simply the lack of “good Indian food.” I do understand that the manner in whic...

This semester has seen a whirlwind of dining changes at Oberlin, including the reopening of Sky Bar’s lunch (and now pilot breakfast) service, the expansion of hours at Stevenson Dining Hall, and the reorganizing and downsizing of Fourth Meal into its original Rathskeller location, to name a few. These changes are a lot for dining administrators to understand, much less Oberlin students already tackling a full workload and rich extracurriculars. To combat the confusion, two new systems of student-administration communication have been developed for the community to learn about dining changes, while also reporting back what isn’t working in practice. The first way is though the Dining Ambassador program, a group...

Editors Note: The following letter is a petition for Oberlin College to terminate its contract with Bon Appétit and to hire its own managers to run CDS. At the bottom of the letter, there will be a link to the petition and a link to personal accounts of current and former CDS workers. All of us at Oberlin, whether we are students, professors, staff, or administrators, have the same goal: making Oberlin College the best it can be. But the management of Oberlin dining services is not the best it can be. We call on Oberlin to adopt self-management to properly manage Campus Dining Services, improve the dining experience, and reduce wasteful spending. WHAT IS SELF-MANAGEMENT? Oberlin College followed a national trend...

Chronic understaffing, overworked staff members, disgruntled employees and complaints about mismanagement. These are some of the issues that Campus Dining Service workers decried more than two years ago, as covered in the Review at the time (“CDS Workers: We’re Overworked, Disrespected,” The Oberlin Review, Oct. 2, 2015). And yet seemingly nothing was fixed in the last two years, as the same set of issues were the central focus of a campus protest Monday. In collaboration with CDS employees, Student Labor Action Coalition coordinated a boycott of dining halls. Members of the organization took to social media and other platforms to encourage students to eat in co-ops or join a picnic in Wilder Hall for...