Dining on campus has always resulted in a litany of complaints from the student body: Dining service hours are inconvenient, options are few, the food is bad for you and nutritional information is not made easily accessible. Furthermore, there are students on campus with more global concerns in mind – whether the coffee is Fair Trade or we support local, sustainable farms and products.
With all the complaints that students seem to have, you would think that Dining Services never bothered to listen to students. This, in fact, is completely not the case.
Over the summer, Dining Services has expanded hours in Danforth, Meliora Club Express and the Meliora. They’ve gone to greater lengths to provide the nutritional information of the food by installing a touch screen kiosk in Danforth where you can read up about what you’re eating. In the fryers this year, all oil is trans-fat free. They even remodeled the kosher deli to expand kosher options.
Apparently, Dining Services does listen to students. Changes often slip in under the radar and that is not necessarily students’ faults. Often any changes made go unpublicized, and thus students never find out about them. Those Salad Pizzas in the Pit that you so desperately wanted to be able to club? Well, this year you can – but you wouldn’t know that without asking. What Dining Services truly fails to do is publicize to students just what it is they have done.
This is odd for a school that is great at telling students, parents and alumni about every self-congratulatory thing on Earth. “Did you hear? We painted the steps to the book store!” “We built a handicapped ramp – 16 years after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act!”
Dining Services, it’s time to round up Gilligan and get on the boat.
