Napoleon noted that an army marches on its stomach, and it seems to me that a similar principle applies to a college, at least insofar as the personal well-being and academic success of its students depend largely on the quality of their food. 

Now, before proceeding any further, I must clarify that there are plenty of elements within our dining system that I consider to be entirely praiseworthy, such as the conduct of the employees at both C-Shop and Davison Hall. Their friendliness and professionalism have brightened my day on multiple occasions, and, as someone who has worked in a burger joint for the past couple years, I hold a sincere respect for those in the food service industry. 

My less positive thoughts regard the nature of the food itself, and, even that, I find to be good- in general. 

However, I have been known to grumble about the food, and I have heard many other grumblings from my fellow students, such that the overall mood I have perceived is one of discontent. Granted, that may not mean much. We may very well be the faultfinders of whom Thoreau spoke, finding faults even in paradise, but there is a campus rumor, a legend passed down from the seniors, which leads me to believe that we are not. 

Indeed, throughout my whole time on campus, hardly a week has gone by without my hearing from one upperclassman or another that Saint Anselm’s food used to be substantially better and that the change coincided with the installation of AVI as the sole provider of campus food. 

I am a freshman, having never known anything else, and I suspect it is for this very reason that these tales have inspired a compelling curiosity within me. It is a sentiment perhaps akin to that of a young Hebrew born in exile and raised on the stories of David’s time, but I digress. This lore has awakened a yearning for that fabled golden age of Anselmian food and a sincere wonder as to what brought about its end. 

In that vein, I began to consider the incentives at play in our present system, and, frankly, I have come to believe that these incentives are perverse to the students’ interests. The problem, as I see it, is that AVI operates both for-profit and with a monopoly.

 Thus, through the profit incentive, they are pushed to minimize the cost at which they acquire and prepare our food, while through the monopoly, they are made free of that second incentive whose opposition to the former is essential in making a market beneficial to consumers – namely, the fear that customer dissatisfaction will result in financial loss. 

For illustration, compare this system, in which the finite pool of meal plan funds must be split between food and profit, to a fully in-house system, in which all meal plan funds can be devoted to the procurement of food. Compare this to a system in which one for-profit company operates C-Shop, and another operates Davison, such that the success of each is tied directly to its popularity with students.

 Reduced to a maxim, my point is this: if a profit motive is to benefit consumers, it must coexist with competition. As it is, we do not seem to have enough. 

Certainly, AVI must compete to retain its place here, but the only risk it runs in this regard is that of the food quality degenerating to such abysmal lows that the college feels pressured to undergo the bothersome process of reworking its contracts. This strikes me as a rather disappointing bar. Further, it is my understanding that petitions attempting to exert this very pressure have been brought in the past and have been received less than warmly by administrators. 

Now, given that they are operating with this set of incentives, I think it is a great credit to the goodwill of the decision-makers at AVI that our food quality has not declined further, and for that, I am grateful. That being said, with the long-term in mind, it strikes me as foolish to rely so heavily on the mere goodwill of a business, especially when that goodwill stands in opposition to economic incentives. 

In saying this, I am confident that the decision to bring AVI to campus was not made flippantly, that the old system was imperfect, and that there are reasons for making the trade-off to what we have now. However, along with the considerable number of dissatisfied students on campus, I am not aware of those reasons. Accordingly, I would entreat the college to make its thought process on this topic more widely known so that we can discuss the matter as a community, and give proper consideration to both the facts and the interests involved. 

Through that, perhaps we will learn that we have all gained a genuinely worthwhile good by sacrificing the old food, or perhaps that a system more akin to that of which the seniors are so fond is better suited to our interests, or perhaps that an entirely new option may be worth trying. Whatever the outcome though, my hope is that our current state of vague discontent and wistful nostalgia will be remedied and that a state of hearty Anselmian morale will take its place, for indeed, a college marches on its stomach.