Every morning at 7:30 a.m., 59-year-old Edward Carpenter drives to the wholesale meat market on South Hampton St. in Boston to look at a few tons of meat products.

"Say a vendor has an order for a couple thousand pounds of roast beef," says Carpenter, the meat and poultry buyer for Harvard University Dining Services (HUDS). "I'II pick out the ones I want."

At about 10 a.m., Carpenter gets back to his office in the Freshman Union and spends the rest of his day making calls to vendors to find and order the best food buys for the Harvard community.

Carpenter is one of about 450 dining service workers who spend a great deal of time ordering, preparing and serving meals to hungry students, who have traditionally been critical of the food HUDS provides.

Assistant Director of Dining Services Administration Dale M. Hennessey says she is sometimes frustrated when students criticize the Union without knowing how much planning and preparation is necessary to run a modern college dining hall.

"[Students] obviously don't know what goes on behind closed doors," Hennessey says.

Dining hall workers begin their day at the crack of dawn, according to Union Manager Katherine E. D'Andria. Three morning cooks and two dining hall administrators arrive at the Union each day at 5 a.m. to start preparing breakfast, D'Andria says. The rest of the morning staff, except for part-time and student workers, is in by 6:30 and stays until 2 or 3 p.m.

The dinner cooks come in at 10:30 a.m. and work until 7:30 p.m. They begin work on the next day's meal, prepare that evening's dinner and help out with that day's lunch if they are needed, D'Andria says.

The cooks are constantly busy during the meal--heating and reheating entrees, chopping and mixing ingredients for the soups and other menu items.

With some exceptions, the menu is on a six-week rotation, says Hennessey, a registered dietician who often comes up with new recipe ideas to add to the 800 food items HUDS already serves.

Each meal has its own guidelines, she adds. The dinner menu, for example, always has two hot entrees, two vegetables and a starch. Each kitchen is given the exact same recipes, Hennessey says, but there may be slight differences in the ways the food is prepared.

Hennessey feeds the recipes into a six-year-old computer system similar to the ones used by other college dining halls across the country. The computer separates food items by type of product and by vendor, and estimates how much of each ingredient will be needed for a particular meal, based on past servings and the time of year, Hennessey says.

This information is then given to Carpenter and Philip R. Bauer '36, the other food buyer. Bauer, who works entirely out of his office, purchases food from all over the world, although most of it is produced in the U.S. Most of the fish and dairy products are produced in New England or New York.

Some food, including fish, is delivered to the dining halls only a day or two before it is served. Other food items, like canned goods and groceries, arrive two weeks before they are served.

But Bauer says, "There's nothing there that's going to spoil."