New Disastrous Meal Plan Could Have Been Avoided

If there is one thing that most, if not all, on-campus students can agree with this semester it is this: the new meal plan sucks. Whoever conjured up this horrendous excuse for a food service plan clearly did not have the best interest of students in mind. There are clear issues that anyone who created this would see if they spent even five minutes in a student’s shoes. But before we examine these issues, let’s review last year. 

As we are all acutely aware, there were circumstances that forced the college to make changes in the meal service last year that must be acknowledged. Many of the temporary changes last year contributed to dining on campus being so easy that one has to wonder why they were not made permanent. The problems break down into three main categories: convenience, ethics, and health.

Convenience begins with online ordering. This was the single greatest improvement CAS has ever made to on-campus dining in the era of COVID. Students did not have to go out of their way to get food. An order could be easily placed and could be picked up at a convenient time. Not to mention food could be ordered online from anywhere with the exclusion of pay-one-price locations. 

Now, I think it is understandable that online ordering had to be taken away because the app could not process a non-monetary order as in the case of unlimited dining, no actual money is spent, but still a new mode of online ordering should be created and made readily available. 

The second convenience is the grab and go options. They don't exist anymore, at least they don't on unlimited. Just like with online ordering it was easy to have reliable options that you didn’t have to wait for, but I think it is the general feeling of the student body that we are willing to dispose online ordering so long as we never again have to contribute a cent to the pyramid scheme known as “Retail Dollars.”

Ethics. A college is an academic institution, and while it is naive to think that a college doesn’t profit off of its students, it shouldn’t be as blatant and unethical as “Retail Dollars.” 

In what way did anyone think this was a good idea that the student body would willingly go along with? Did they think we wouldn’t notice the strategic choices they made as to locations to put on this plan? Did they think they could just slip the use of the word “retail” by us? 

In the original scheme, and that is what it is, all of the most popular locations on campus: Jacks, Max Market, Starbucks, and Upstairs MJ were all retail, in which case returning students would only have $250 for the whole semester and be forced to pay out of pocket to go to their favorite places on campus. 

Colleges should not be operating retail locations, while Starbucks and vending machines are actual retail options and make sense to have on a separate portion of the meal plan, the college itself should not be running retail food operations to rob their students of even more money.

Health. The new food is just not healthy, or least it seems healthy options are not encouraged. CAS had to be convinced to add a salad bar to downstairs MJ, and the best rotating options are at the grill and pasta. Thankfully, CAS has now realized that the deli and smoothies need to be on unlimited, and they have made the proper adjustments. But we still cannot get unlimited toppings on wraps and salads, nor unlimited fruit in smoothies, nor can we get anything toasted, not even a flatbread pizza. 

That’s just in terms of the health of the food, not to mention the fact that we can no longer swipe our own cards. It is possibly one of the most demeaning things to have to hand my card to someone and have them swipe it for me. 

The biggest oversight CAS made was to have too many rotating options. Students can only rely on a few consistent options, that was one of the beauties of last year, as there were consistent options everyone knew were there. While it is nice to have some rotating options, there must be more consistency in the future.

To sum up the problem with this meal plan: CAS broke something that didn’t need fixing.