For the first 17 years David M. Lentini worked in Harvard's dining halls, about one or two students a day asked him if the dining service could start providing Heinz ketchup. Seeking to satisfy these students, Lentini frequently asked his managers to buy it--to no avail.

But with the arrival of Michael P. Berry, director of Harvard Dining Services (HDS) in 1990, customer service was moved to the front burner. The dining halls have begun to offer numerous new programs and services to students with special needs and eccentric culinary tastes. According to Lentini, students nowadays can not only get Heinz ketchup, but can also make requests and expect prompt service.

"Customers are the reason for our being," according to the stated mission of HDS written in 1991. "Students are the primary focus of our business activity....we understand the importance of courteous, attentive service that accommodates the varying needs of the members of the campus community."

Yellow feedback cards give students the opportunity to make special requests or complain about meals. All dining halls guarantee that an HDS employee will call students within 24 hours after receiving a yellow card to discuss a complaint or notify the student about the feasibility of requesting an additional cereal or type of bread.

Sarah Bartholomew, supervisor of the Adams House dining hall, says the Adams staff receives and average of about five cards per week. After special meals, she says, more students submit feedback cards. Following yesterday's Elegant Brunch, for example, 12 students turned in cards.

For students with special needs, HDS purchases soy milk and salt-free seasonings, according to Michael Miller, coordinator of production and quality assurance.

Special kosher meals and the recent addition of garden burgers to the dining halls' daily grill menu offer more dining alternatives for students with special needs. HDS also provides students with bag lunches if they don't have time for a sit-down lunch.

"We try to accomodate students as much as we possibly can," says Miller, who says many of HDS's customer service programs grew out of focus groups with students that were held last spring.

"Nutrition Bites" binders, one of the latest efforts to help students eat well, was one of these programs. The 381-page informational notebooks provide students with fat, calorie, carbohydrate, protein and vitamin breakdowns for all HDS food offerings.

For example, one chicken chimichanga has 5.009 kilocalories, 1.13 grams of carbohydrates, .049 grams of fat and .253 grams of protein. Six ounces of turkey tettrazini has 510 kilocalories, 52.12 grams of carbohydrates, 20.09 grams of fat and 28.03 grams of protein.

To help students make sense of the thick Nutrition Bites binder and make healthy meal choices, strolling nutritionist Shirley S. Hung, a student at the School of Public Health, visits dining halls Thursday and Friday evenings. Her job is to provide students with nutritional counseling and help them formulate a healthy, well-balanced diet, Hung says.

With a display of colorful fliers in fron of her, Hung says she sits at the most prominent table she can find and waits to answer students' questions.

Hung says the most common questions she gets are about weight loss or gain, low fat diets and how to get specific nutrients like protein and iron. Her advice to students wanting to have a healthy diet is to base their eating on a food pyramid--a refinement of the old four food group recommendation.

"Base the diet on the bottom of the pyramid," Hung says. Items at the bottom of the food pyramid include bread, pasta, fruit and vegatables.

"It's all about shifting, not cutting things out completely. Balance, moderation and variety are the three key elements to a healthy diet," she says.