No, that machine with the colorful screen in the Thayer Dining Hall lobby is not a video game featuring Dartmouth Dining Services employees.
This new computer offers fat and calorie counts for foods sold in DDS establishments. It may be a useful service for some students, but some people are concerned that this information could be detrimental to students with eating disorders.
Test site for kiosk
DDS Food Production Manager Don Reed said Dartmouth is one of few colleges in the country to have such a nutrition information system available to students. Reed said the College incurred no cost for the program itself and is a test site for it.
But Director of Dining Services Pete Napolitano said there were "some costs associated with" the kiosk, although they were minimal.
Reed said the kiosk is for distributing nutrition information and it "uses [DDS's] recipes, so if someone wants to know how many grams of fat or calories are in the meal they just had, they could access that information."
He said the nutrition information is based on the USDA food data base, which contains information about staple foods, but not specific items such as brand-name products or Dartmouth-specific foods. "Those are the types of things that I would have to put in," Reed said.
He said the information available on the kiosk is part of DDS's menu management system, which is connected to the DDS data base of recipes, inventory and purchases.
Reed said he hopes the DDS nutritional information will be connected in the future to the computer network which allows students to access their Dash accounts.
This has how much fat?!
Napolitano said he thinks many students find the kiosk useful. "Before, they weren't sure how many calories and fat were in things," he said.
But he said other students have argued that the kiosk could promote eating disorders, "because having this information available will make them more self-conscious about what they are eating."
Napolitano said he does not completely agree with such thinking because "the problem is not just in the information."
Coordinator of the College's Nutrition Education Program Marcia Herrin said it is difficult to predict how the availability of information about DDS food might affect some students.
She said the information available on the Thayer kiosk is "very much patterned after information on the [U.S. nutrition facts] food labels," which she has seen students use to further practice of an eating disorder.
Herrin said she wrote a warning "read me" message accessible on the kiosk that cautions against basing all eating habits on the facts presented in the system. The kiosk also has recent nutrition articles she wrote.
Herrin said she is pleased DDS has chosen to have their information available on a kiosk rather than "in your face at the point of service, so you don't have any choice whether to look at it," which is the case at many other colleges .
"Students can make a choice to look at this or not," she said.
She said she thinks having nutrition information available is a positive idea in general for helping students to make informed decisions about their diets. But she added that she encourages students to look at their overall diet instead of one particular food and pay attention to food groups rather than give so much numerical attention to food.
"Eating by the numbers isn't healthy," Herrin said. "It is unnecessary for most people."
Other features of the information program include print-outs of queries as well as advice. By entering height, weight and sex, people can find out their recommended daily calorie intake.
Herrin said she thinks the recommended values are too low, and she would like to see the feature removed from the program.
She said she hopes any students who "who have a fear of what they find on the programs" will visit her.
Member of Students Against the Abuse of Food and Exercise Melissa Rikard '99 wrote in an e-mail message that SAFE does not support the idea of the kiosk and thinks it may encourage more eating disorders.
"We believe it may perpetuate the idea of analyzing and obsessing over one's food intake, a practice that often leads to disordered eating habits," Rikard wrote.
Currently the system only provides information on some foods served at Food Court and Westside Buffet.
