Virginia Woolf said, "One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well." As manager of Towers Dining Hall and Subway, Lori Hinson '81 works to ensure that Ithaca College students do "dine well." She and her staff provide around 1,350 meals Monday through Friday, a task requiring a balance of budgetary requirements against a wide range of student tastes. She also makes sure that the dining hall is an inviting place for important activities besides eating-for making contact and taking comfort, for talking to friends, and sometimes for being reminded of home.
Although
managers of all the dining halls plan together to maintain some
consistency in offerings, each hall also provides unique fare.
In the Towers, for example, eggs are grilled to order for breakfast,
and healthful make-it-yourself stir-fry is offered at dinner.
Hinson believes in being as responsive to student requests as
possible. "We make small changes in any given week based
on requests."
A psychology major from Queens, Hinson stayed in Ithaca after graduation and worked at Alpha House and the Task Force for Battered Women. During a time when funding for such programs was suffering cutbacks, she decided to pursue her second professional love and moved to Rhode Island to earn a culinary arts degree. After working as a catering manager in Florida, she returned to make Ithaca her home. In her seven years with the College, her psychology background has continued to be surprisingly useful; as she manages planning, budget, public relations, and supply issues each day, she also wears the hats of "mentor and a little bit of a trainer and a little bit of a teacher" to her staff.
"The staff is what makes the dining hall," Hinson says, laughing at the popular misconception that dining service staff are "lunch ladies" in hair nets spooning out macaroni and cheese. "It's a group of professionals back there," she says of a team comprising 25 full-time employees and as many as 120 students. Her management philosophy acknowledges the relevance of personal problems confronting employees, as well as their professional performance, and she often finds herself speaking with staff about their private lives. "People will bring to you problems that they have. I'm not sure if that happens to everyone or if it happens to me because I'm sensitive to it." She encourages employees to get help for personal concerns, and she keeps an eye out for students facing difficulties as well.
Dining hall work offers new opportunities to students, many of
whom begin without work experience and must master even such basics
as arriving on time. Student staffers who perform exceptionally
well may earn promotion to student cook or enter the student manager
training program. Hinson values the chance to "work with
people from Vermont, Maine, Hawaii- just people from different
backgrounds." She has pursued her interest in diversity through
serving on the campus Diversity Awareness Committee, which she
finds
"a really positive, upbeat thing." She says that working
with students can be hard, though, because "you have some
attachments, and four years go by, and they're gone."
Hinson and Dining Services staff member Darlene Pepin share a "fixer-upper" in the country, where gardening offers a "very centering" avocation. In her dreams for an ideal future, Hinson envisions operating a facility where she could both feed hungry people and help them develop employment skills. "I need to come up with the money and the place," she says, "so I need to win the Lotto!"