A recent New York Times dining section piece told the story of a 17-year old on his spring college shopping tour. Apparently the young fellow’s selection criteria was not limited to a school’s academic strengths but also included the quality of its dining service. On the day the young man visited Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, he was transfixed by the dining hall’s sumptuous repast that included vegetable ragout over polenta, spicy orange beef, Dijon-crusted chicken, vegetarian pho and spinach sautéed with garlic and olive oil. Precocious palate or not, the would-be collegian readily admitted to “something subliminal from the food…that influences your decision [about the college].”

My own tour not long ago of the Storehouse, New Mexico’s largest food pantry was decidedly less than subliminal. Young mothers, mostly Hispanic, pushed shopping carts loaded with children past shelves of USDA powdered milk and canned vegetables. Dried pinto beans donated by a Colorado milling company, and day-old white bread salvaged by Albuquerque VFW Post 401 gave the pantry a well-stocked, if not inviting look. Rounding out the inventory was ground beef shading toward the brown end of the color spectrum, fluid milk only a heartbeat from its code date, and cardboard bins of over ripe cantaloupes that most of us would consign to the compost pile.

Should the budding gourmet select Bowdoin, mom and dad will pony up something in excess of $45,000 per year, of which $5,200 or $2,600 for a four-month semester will be allocated to his food tab. Given the superiority of the dining hall’s fare, the Fair Trade certification of its coffee, and the 20 per cent of the food sourced locally, including from two student-run organic gardens, it sounds like a pretty good deal.