By Sarah Welsh-Huggins
Dear Lafayette Dining Services,
As one of the many winter sport student-athletes who spent interim break on campus, I wanted to share my appreciation for your evolving Upper Farinon menu. During interim, those cold January days are filled with practice two (or three) times a day, lifting, cross-training, stretching, icing, strategy meetings and all other sorts of arduous mid-season activities. And after running 16 x 400 meters, or swimming intervals the last thing athletes want to do is worry about not getting a good post-workout meal.
But for many years, the lack of variety and appeal of our interim meals left us athletes (and our stomachs) grumbling for more.
Don’t get me wrong. We appreciate that someone else cooks and cleans up our meals for us. But in all honesty, our meal choices in years past were often less than satisfying: The standard was salad for lunch, pasta for dinner. Other days, it was pasta for lunch and salad for dinner. And every now and again we would really switch it up: how about cereal for lunch and pizza for dinner?
Overall, not the most appetizing fare.
This year, however, as ice bag-wrapped athletes rolled into Upper, we noticed a marked difference in the food we were served.
The salad and pasta bars remained, of course, but had been joined by a Make-Your-Own-Sandwich bar! Vegetarian options! Eclectic and tasty entrees! Far from not having enough food, we now found ourselves almost overwhelmed by the myriad of new interim meal offerings.
Our twice-daily uphill walks from the gym to the dining hall no longer seemed so painful, once we knew that at the end of our climb we would be greeted by plates of pesto ravioli, chili and cornbread or pineapple chicken on a bed of coconut rice.
So, to the cooks, chefs and cleaning staff of Upper Farinon, I give a resounding thank you. Thank you for your listening to our comments, for bringing us M&M cookies, for giving us grilled cheese and tomato soup, and for providing us with the fuel to perform our very best. When we break those school records, we’ll know where credit is due.
Keep up the good workâand may we please have a few more of those sweet potato fries?
Yours truly,
A well-fed athlete