Amidst the hustle and bustle of Pitzer College’s McConnell Dining Hall, a recently added sign sits beside the tubs of apples, oranges and bananas: “Fruit is not ready to eat. Needs to be washed to eat.”
The sign was put up by General Manager Miguel Menjivar and Executive Chef Marcos Ríos. Both are from the Bon Appétit Management Company, a restaurant company which provides food management services to universities across the country.
Bon Appétit’s website indicates a “farm to fork” emphasis in their catering. Menjivar reaffirmed local farms as the source for McConnell’s produce.
“Everything we put out comes in the day before; it’s not refrigerated,” Menjivar said. “The sign is basically letting you know that you should be cleaning the fruit. All the fruits, because they are organic, have a label on there that shows that they come from a box, so they haven’t been cleaned.”
The two McConnell dining heads explained that the fruit is washed once it is picked at the farms, but is not washed again at McConnell because of the resources needed to wash them again in-house.
“We don’t have a sink to drain [the fruits],” Menjivar said. “We would have to wash them, drain them: It would require quite an ordeal to do it. So they’ve never been washed here.”
Ryan Chen PZ ’27 — the owner of the McConnell Apple Enthusiast account on Instagram, where he uploads photos of dining hall apples — described how not washing the fruits makes consuming them in the dining hall a hassle.
“I started [my] account because I am a fan of the produce at McConnell and I wanted to let people know when they had good fruit in,” Chen said. “Part of me does wish that [the fruits were] pre-washed so that we could have [them] with our meals.”
He also emphasized how, while beneficial, the sign may dissuade diners from eating fruit entirely due to the additional hurdle of having to wash them.
“We already see a good percentage of the fruit in the dining hall go bad sitting in the trays and I don’t think this will exactly encourage people to eat more fruit,” Chen said.
Bon Appétit also manages the dining services at Scripps and Claremont McKenna Colleges (CMC). While there has been no sign put up at Scripps, CMC has a similar sign to Pitzer’s reminding diners to wash fruits before consumption.
“It is a Bon Appétit sign, but it wasn’t a Bon Appétit decision,” Menjivar said. “It’s just something we thought made sense and we just wanted to put it out there.”
Menjivar elaborated on communication between the three dining halls surrounding management.
“While we are [all] run by Bon Appetit, the way we run and how we do our food is different because every account has its own personality,” Menjivar said. “We do have the same managers, though: If they have had the same discussions [about the fruit], I couldn’t tell you that. But we don’t coordinate.”
He stated that the farms from which all three dining halls source their food are probably different.
“We have a number of farms that we can work with,” Menjivar said. “We just particularly find some that are able to keep up with what we put out there. We have two, three farms that we use. I don’t know if they’re the same ones that they use. They have access to them, for sure, because we have the same purchasing system, but they could have picked other ones. These ones just seemed to work for us.”
Bon Appétit staff at both CMC and Scripps did not respond to TSL’s inquiries about their fruit policy.
Menjivar emphasized that the McConnell staff works diligently to make their diners as healthy and informed as possible.
“We’re always going over everything that we do and we try to make sure that everything is updated and working for what we’re doing now,” Menjivar said.
Ríos underscored that the best way to handle the fruit situation, given McConnell’s current resources, was to make diners aware of the cleanliness of the fruits.
“Our best practice is for you guys to have a sign,” Ríos said.
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