by Spencer Goodson

This story was updated on Sept. 24 at 4:18 PM.

Dining hall menus don’t always match what food is available. That’s because the University of Maryland’s Dining Services is still feeling the effects of food outages due to the pandemic that have caused havoc for restaurants nationwide, it said. 

Those food outages mean staff have to make substitutions — and the menu could be outdated, said Bart Hipple, the assistant director of communications for Dining Services.

“There’s still lots of variety, it just may not be exactly what’s on the menu,” Hipple said.

Sophomore psychology major Ava Barrios has noticed a lack of chicken in the dining halls.

“This year, I’ve been here for almost a month and a half and have been to the dining hall a good 15 times and I’ve never seen chicken nuggets, chicken tenders or anything of the sort,” said Barrios.

Hipple said Dining Services is working on the chicken tender situation.

“Historically, we’ve run them as a special one evening a week,” Hipple said, but food outages have made that near impossible. They did manage to scrape together enough chicken tenders to offer a special soon, he added. 

Sophomore psychology major Anna Tucker said she hasn’t been bothered by the outages — in fact, she’s impressed by the wide variety of choices this semester.

“Last year, there were multiple times where me and Ava would go to the dining hall and there would be nothing we liked and we would go to the convenience store or somewhere else for dinner,” she said.

Dining Services is doing everything possible to avoid food outages, Hipple said, including going outside its normal channels and normal distributor to find the same products elsewhere or source replacements to minimize those substitutions.

And it has a trick up its sleeve: Menu rotations. Those rotations help to minimize ripple effects of food outages because each dining hall has a unique menu. That menu switches to another dining hall after the week is done — meaning by the time the menu rotates, staff can source substitutions. That minimizes outages.

“At this point, we haven’t been out of a major product for a significant amount of time,” he said.

Featured image: A sign warns students about food outages. Photo by Spencer Goodson.