So long Maryland Dining Services

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. ~Virginia Woolf

I come to you in my last post of my freshman year, the last day, the last night in the dorms, and more importantly, the last time I will have to eat at the dining hall… at least for another 3 months.

So long to dining hall food! (at least for the next 3 months). I just ate my last dinner of campus foods, and I am so glad that I can now take a break. Let me explain.

It is not that the food is horribly atrocious. It just isn’t all that good. And it really really gets old. Cafeterias seem to get bad names for horrible food. You know those horror stories. But what else can you expect when the food has to be prepared on a scale large enough to feed thousands of hungry young scholars. So in this situation, it is understandable when the quality sometimes suffers. But I still don’t think it is right to have to settle for barely tolerable food for nine months. The food we eat at school serves the same purpose as the food we eat at home, and I would argue that this requires an even greater emphasis on providing satisfying, filling, AND healthy foods.

The dining hall food on my campus sometimes seems like it doesn’t provide any of those characteristics. Now, I would like to take a moment and point out that our dining services is probably much better than many others across the country. Sometimes they offer a really great meal, and they do try to incorporate special events and community dining into their program. And I think everyone appreciates that. But every other day, when there is no special catering, and you are eating the same meal for the 3rd time in one week, you can definitely find something wrong with dining services.

To begin with, the value meal, which you might think of as a ‘blue plate special’ is a on a repeating 3 week schedule. Which means in the 9 months you spend on campus, you will have the same exact meal… well I’m not exactly sure how many times (I am NOT a math major), but let’s just say you will have it a lot. Towards the end of the semester, the dining hall seems to stop ordering food from its suppliers. Fresh fruit becomes rare, the sweets counter starts to run out, some food stations begin to close, and that good old menu starts repeating all the left over meals. Shouldn’t the end of the year deserve better food? After all, this is the time when students must deal with more stress with finals, and being well fed is essential to doing well and staying focused, at least.

Another major problem I have is with the lack of balanced healthy plates available daily. Since I am largely addressing the value meal, let’s talk about the options here. Usually, with almost every dinner meal, there is an option of some type of vegetable, mixed veggies, broccoli, cauliflower, or peas. Honestly, however, these vegetables are also usually less than desirable. A few days ago, the broccoli that landed on my plate was somehow so bleached it almost looked like cauliflower. The mixed veggies are usually so soft, watery, and overcooked that it could almost be a soup. Sometimes, there just aren’t any vegetables at all. Other times you have to go out of your way to get edible vegetables on to your plate, by visiting different food stations or the salad bar to pick out some raw broccoli, spinach or pepper slices. This can be a serious and time consuming problem when your half-hour dinner break was taken at the expense of your studying time.

So what would I (reasonably) do if I were the head of campus dining services?

1. Make better Asian noodles/ stir fry and rice dishes, because the occasional option now usually keeps everyone away in favor of burgers and fries.
2. Give a greater variety of vegetables with every meal, insuring that they don’t sit out all day in the hot plate, to prevent ‘mushiness’.
3. Bring in catering services and special events more often that every two or three months.
4. (and sushi in the dining hall doesn’t count. I will eat it, but really… just think about it. Sushi?... in the dining hall? Sounds a little sketchy to me)
5. Offer at least one new original, or special dish every week to break the monotony of the 3-week-schedule.
6. Offer a waffle-maker all day long. (Just because I really like waffles).

And just for the record, I would like to point out a few good things about Maryland dining services:

1. My last dinner was not all that bad. And the food looked kind of good on the plates. (see above pictures).
2. They made 54,000 cupcakes in the shape of the university's seal. That is pretty impressive.
3. The ice cream in fantastic, made in the University Dairy.
4. The waffles, served at weekend brunch and occasionally weekday breakfasts, have Testudo (the school mascot at the center). He's my favorite!