Tuesday’s Argus featured an ad titled “Wesleyan University Dining: Positive Changes for you.” In addition to a paragraph touting University Dining Services as a concerned group responsive to students’ suggestions and concerns, a list was included containing thirteen bulleted points under the heading “New this Fall.” I was excited to find out about all the new options they were giving students this year; that is, until I read the list and realized that the ‘improvements’ are too little, too late. Here are a few of the points they champion:
• More hours at the vegan café; now you can eat dinner too. Well thanks a lot guys, but I seem to recall that the vegan café used to be open for dinner before you closed it last year. Thanks for opening it again, but the saving grace of vegan café dinners—the option to sauté your meal and add brown rice—is still curiously absent. The vegan café’s current dinner is basically just leftovers from lunch.
• Added 15 minutes to lunch at Mocon and Summerfields, which are now open until 1:30 p.m. daily. Great that Mocon and Summerfields are now open until the same time as the campus center, but how about keeping the campus center lunch open until 2 p.m. like it was two years ago?
• New wrap station at the campus center. Now you’ve got to be kidding me. If a student reuses a paper they wrote the year before, it’s called plagiarism; dedicating one half of the already existing sandwich bar to wraps does not count as a “new wrap station.” You used to be able get wraps most of the time anyway, and now the service is slower because you’ll frequently find four people waiting to order on the sandwich side and no one on the wrap side. Thanks for the improvement!
• Due to student requests for ethnic food, the campus center introduced the Tex-Mex program “Tortilla Fresca.” Well that’s a nice try, but that opened up last year, so don’t try to get by including this on a list of items that are supposedly “New this Fall.”
Wesleyan’s dining options are atrocious. If University Dining Services really wants to improve dining experiences on campus, THEY SHOULD LET STUDENTS OPT NOT TO BUY A MEAL PLAN. The best food a student can eat on this campus is prepared in his or her own home, and those ingredients would be way cheaper if bought at the supermarket instead of Weshop. If students needed food on the go, they could still choose to stop by the campus center and pay in cash. But of course if that happened, they might realize that dinner at the campus center costs more than a meal at Typhoon or Japanica, and we couldn’t have that!
Leave a Reply