Jean Mayer was standing in the Dudley House lunch line waiting for a grilled tuna fish and cheese sandwich.

"Are you really eating here?" a student asked him. "I thought you, at least, would have enough sense to stay away."

Mayer laughed and moved down the line to carefully consider the choice of salads. He picked up a plastic wrapped three-bean salad and then paused before the fruit. "Are you sure you won't have some fruit?" he asked his luncheon guest. She shook her head. "Not even an apple?" he persisted. He filled a glass with lemonade.

A compactly built man with a French accent, Mayer radiates his special brand of charm even when he's ordering lunch. While passing through the line he has managed to say something to all the food service employees, the cashier, and several students. But he is not, by any means, an overbearing chatterbox. A man of outstanding accomplishments. Mayer is also exceptionally modest. He would rather talk about his work as master of Dudley House than about his many achievements in the field of nutrition.

Born in Paris in 1920, Mayer is the son of the famous French physiologist, Andre Mayer. Father and son have had remarkably similar careers. As students, both excelled in the humanities as well as the sciences. Both were decorated during world wars. Andre taught in a French medical school; Jean is a professor of nutrition, affiliated with the Harvard School of Public Health for 25 years. While Andre was instrumental in forming and leading the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, Jean served on many U.N. nutrition committees and has advised Presidents Nixon and Ford on U.S. food policy.

Mayer is uncertain how much his father influenced his career choice. "I was always very interested in physiology," said Mayer, who earned a Ph.D. in physiological chemistry from Yale and a doctor of science from the University of Paris. "I don't think I had that many conversations with my father about my future or science until I embarked on that career."

Mayer could have easily followed his father and had a successful career in France, but he decided, after visiting the United States in 1939, that he would eventually make his home here. This decision often put him in an awkard position when serving on General de Gaulle's private staff during the war. Mayer says now that de Gaulle fed him "a lot of nasty and often very justified comments on the way the United States treated France."

In spite of these comments, Mayer liked working with the general. "I've had fairly close contact with several chiefs of state, and there's no doubt that de Gaulle was the star of the outfit," he said.

Mayer came to national attention in 1969 when he organized and chaired Nixon's First White House Conference on Food, Nutrition, and Health. As a result of that conference, the number of food stamp and free school lunch recipients increased dramatically.

Nixon was interested in the conference, Mayer said, because hunger was the only social problem that he believed he could solve in one term. "It is a paradox of history that while Nixon was not elected to feed the poor, he did more in that area than Kennedy or Johnson," Mayer observed.

Mayer said he had good relations with Nixon, but he sometimes had problems with Haldeman and Erlichman, who feared the cost of new food programs. Anytime they bothered him, however, Mayer went over their heads to the president. "When the president would make brave speeches, Haldeman and Erlichman always saw them as rhetorical ploys--Nixon said it, but he didn't mean it," said Mayer. "Whether Nixon meant what he said or not, he got stuck with me and I was determined to take some action."

As a member of the President's Consumer Advisory Council, Mayer thinks President Ford is "much nicer in some ways than Mr. Nixon, but I find him far less supportive."

Whether dealing with federal or Harvard bureaucrats, Mayer seems to have a flair for getting what he wants done. "He's very forceful and gets other people to do their best for him," said John R. Marquand, rotund and affable senior tutor at Dudley House. "He's not inclined to give in to bureaucratic opposition."

"When he believes in something, said Mayer's wife Betty, a petite, soft-spoken woman, "he's so convincing that he carries other people along with him."

If there is one group that Mayer has carried along with him, it is the members of Dudley House. Many say they are convinced that no other House has a master who is as helpful and friendly as he is.