Boston-area colleges’ foodservices react to city lockdown

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April 19—As the world has watched in awe of the manhunt currently going on in Boston, students at affected-area colleges have been told to stay in their residences, creating a tricky situation for several college foodservice operations. FSD spoke to David Davidson, managing director of dining services at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Mass. He said although the campus is closed, the dining services team was ready to serve residence students in their appropriate halls.

"We have 13 undergraduate dining halls and two graduate dining halls, each of which has a dining hall, so the students don’t have to leave the building to get fed,” Davidson says. “All our residence dining operations are open. We did have several staff members who could not get to work today because public transportation shut down. So we closed our retail and catering division and moved those employees over to residence dining program. We were ready to serve breakfast and lunch. At this point we’re taking it one meal at a time.”

The New York Times Ledeblog also had a few updates from other area colleges regarding foodservice for on-campus students. Excerpts from the blog:

• Boston University’s dining services announced it would deliver meals to some students on lockdown, but others were instructed to retrieve food from specific dining locations that remained opened during the manhunt.

• At Boston College in Chestnut Hill, Mass., Vice PresidentPatrick J. Keating said that students would be permitted to leave their dormitories briefly to pick up lunch and dinner from the university cafeteria, which they were to eat in their dorm rooms.

• Tufts University announced that it would provide “safe transportation” to and from dining halls.

FSD will update this post as more information becomes available.