Editorials Short vacations and good eats

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You might call us un-thankful, but...

With the College's student population spread out across the country, and the world for that matter, it is high-time Middlebury seriously consider expanding the Thanksgiving recess to be a week-long break, as our peers at Amherst and Bates have already done.

The three-days off for Thanksgiving make it difficult for many students to travel all the way home and back with enough time to eat in between. The pricey and limited selection of flights out of Burlington airport seem to skyrocket in cost and run out of seats on the Tuesday and Wednesdays we get let out for breaks. For that reason, many students already take off the weekend before and skip classes to pretend they have a whole week vacation. Which leads to the most important point, right now those two scrap days are just that: scraps. Many professors already cancel classes or make them optional, and many students take off with or without their professors' consent. By making the vacation a week long, and adding the two days to the beginning or end of the semester calendar, those days of class time could be more meaningful and productive.

The greatest sacrifice of creating a week-long break would be the fact that it could undermine the precious harmony that the College finally found this year, making fall break land on a Monday and Tuesday, so that, with the Wednesday through Friday Thanksgiving recess, each day of the week missed an equal number of class sessions in the semester. And there are no longer those crazy, mind-bending days where one week we have to pretend Tuesday is really Thursday, or other such nonsense, to balance out the calendar. But this technical concern is a minor issue if modifying the calendar could save students and faculty time and money, and could make two now meaningless class days a whole lot more productive.


About those good eats at Ross

While it is not normally the purview of the editorial to play the part of campus food critic, Ross Commons did something extraordinary the week before break and we want to recognize it. From Tuesday to Thursday, Nov. 14-17, the Ross staff made eating fun and tasty again, and they made it a little bit adventurous, too. For these four nights leading into the International Student Organization's Cultural Show, Ross offered creative and original dining menus from different regions of the world

They offered a Middle Eastern night with lamb and vegetable curry, falafel with hilbeh and tabbouleh. They offered a European night with roast pork with cranberry port sauce, grilled vegetable strudel, french bread and tiramisu. There was a night of Asian cuisine starring real sushi, as well as tofu miso soup, Korean BBQ short ribs, steamed vegetable dumplings, and fiery mixed vegetables. And then they wrapped it all up with an evening of Latin American dining on Friday, featuring black bean soup, tilapia with tangerine sauce, feijoada, tomato rice, Latin style chicken and sweet rice pudding.

Hungry yet? We will be honest that we still do not know what some of the things were that we ate in this week of international cuisine, but they were different and we liked them. And just contrast those offerings with tonight's, back-to-the regular selection of chicken, chicken, chicken and tofu cacciatore. The creativity did not just mean a better meal, it was a better atmosphere, too. Students were stopping chefs to ask if they could bring in some of their ethnic recipes from home. Ross dining hall was overcrowded, but it meant more people were taking breaks from work to cross campus and enjoy a long and filling meal. Whatever the costs in time, energy or money to put together this week, we hope Ross will bring it back more often, and that other dining halls will venture to put a little adventure in our daily suppers.