People who grow ecstatic over mounds of fresh, sweet raisins floating in cool, creamy, white yogurt will have to bring their own wrinkled fruits to the dining halls early this year, or live without.

Soaring food costs--a 20 per cent increase in wholesale prices over the past year--and Harvard Food Services' first deficit spending schedule in recent history have led to plans for numerous minor cutbacks. And raisins, currently high-priced and in short supply, have become the first casualty in the University's new battle of the bulging budget.

The increase in this year's board contracts is only $25 per person, to $920, enough to cover just a small part of the expected deficit. To break even the University would have had to raise prices $70 to $80, something it hopes to overcome "through good management," said Stephen S.J. Hall, vice president for Administration.

But good management alone cannot offset the entire loss. Summer school deficits caused by Phase III freezes, along with future price rises, could swell that figure to over $300,000--perhaps as high as a half-million dollars. Personnel will not be cut back, Hall promised, so something must give elsewhere.

At 399 Harvard St.--helped by such magazines as Institutions/Volume Feeding, Food Service Marketing, Quick Frozen Foods, School Food-service Journal and Commercial Kitchen and Dining Room--the Food Services administration is attempting to decide just what that something will be.

When confronted with policy questions, Food Services administrators usually speak in pairs. Last year interviews included C. Graham Hurlbut, director of Food Services and Frank J. Weissbecker, associate director. This year, with Hurlbut on leave in Europe, Weissbecker led the interview team with Benjamin H. Walcott, assistant director, as backup.

Weissbecker, lighting his pipe and leaning forward in his chair, vowed that any changes would be "subtle and involve a lot of little things," stressing that "we do not intend to sacrifice quality. We're very quality-minded around here."

Slipping into foodservice-ese, he predicted there would be "certain less expensive dishes--more casserole-type presentations, perhaps, and more sandwich-soup-type presentations." He said, however, that the Food Services Department would serve to "maintain the current variation in the menu cycle" as much as possible.

The subtle changes Food Services currently has in mind include such alterations as more puddings and fewer pies for dessert, and perhaps a less varied selection; less expensive cuts of beef; and, if meat prices in general remain abnormally high or rise further, more poultry dishes.

As for those rare, pleasant dinners of scrumptious sirloin steak, said Walcott, "we obviously cannot pay $3 a pound [for steak] and run it on the menu."

I

In general, Harvard's problems with wholesale prices reflect the general public's difficult times at the retail market. This summer many frustrated consumers took refuge in hamburger-soy protein combinations, for example, which sold at prices about 20 cents a pound lower than 100 per cent ground beef.

This mix brings Harvard Food Services "moderate, but not tremendous" savings, Weissbecker said, and more of it may appear in meals. The department has set a limit of 20 pounds soy to 80 pounds of the real thing in any particular dish, he added.

Hall later elaborated by saying that the soy substitute would be used only in dishes where it could be disguised: "In turkey a la king or chicken a la king, for example, some people even think it makes it taste better," he said. "But too much soy makes a lesser quality product. And we'll never put two soya products on the same menu."

"Of course," Hall continued, "if the other choice is liver, and you don't like liver either, I guess you're out of luck." Soy liver substitutes, he said facetiously, would probably please no one.