College Food

[SobaAddict70]

In the spirit of exploring new culinary frontiers (and also because I'm a bit curious), how would you describe your experiences with college cafeterias and dorm food?

Is it every bit as bad as say...English boarding school food? High school cafeteria food? Tasteless glop and ramen noodles?

I went to Hunter College in New York City (B.A., class of 1999). Let me tell you that the chili and nachos were items best avoided. At least their soups were ok.

Soba

[tryska]

i went to Adelphi out on Long Island - the food was not memorable, obviously.

i seem to remember living on breakfast - the best meal of the day, and a fabulous reuben they used to have.

also chicken cutlet on a roll - something a junior i started chatting with during my first visit prior to attending told me to always remember.

it was also my first exposure to black bean soup, which scared the hell otu of me, never having laid eyes on black beans ever in my life. it looked like the labrea tarpits to me. to this day i have never had black bean anything.

another thing abotu the food - i don't know what the deal was, but it seemed like within an hour of eating the cafeterias meals (outside of breakfast) i wound up being forced to nap for about 2 hours. i'm not sure why as i've never been a napper.

i was thrilled to move into my off-campus apartment and enjoy trhe splendors of customizing ramen noodels and lipton pasta and sauce, or rice and sauce dishes. joy.

[bilrus]

I lived on Lipton packages as a senior when I had my off campus place - If I couldn't make it in one dish and then eat out of it, I wouldn't do it.

Soba, it's funny you mention the chili at your school as being something to avoid. It was on the salad bar every day at my school (Westminter College, MO 1991). The running joke among my friends was that after every dinner I would decide if I should have a bowl of chili or a bowl of Captain Crunch Crunchberries. The chili was always pretty nasty on the first day a new pot was made, but by the third our fourth day it was downright good.

Unlimited cold cereal and chocolate milk were the highlights of my college eating career.

Is it any wonder that I now weigh in excess of 400 pounds? Oh that and the beer.

[vengroff]

These days a lot of college campuses are installing shopping mall style food courts in place of dining halls. Students can charge Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and so on to their meal plans.

[tommy]

The running joke among my friends was that after every dinner I would decide if I should have a bowl of chili or a bowl of Captain Crunch Crunchberries.

i lived on captain crunch with crunchberries and cheesesteaks at college. partly because the other food was just so bad, but mostly because i was usually stoned.

[KNorthrup]

We had typically lousy food. I think it was run by Aramark. One of those large corps that also do airports. But it was in unlimited quantities! Apparently that's not standard. The only clear horror memory is getting pancakes one morning and being unable to cut them. Even with a knife. So then I tried just tearing them into pieces with both hands. Got all sticky but still no luck. Not sure how they did that. Big vats of nacho cheese sauce at every meal that you could pour over whatever you wanted.

I remember one meal with a fellow from South Africa. How he ended up in the arctic I don't recall. But he got half a dozen plates of various offerings and couldn't take more than a couple bites of each. As we're gathering everything back onto the trays, he announces "I am now making the transition from African to American : I am throwing away food."

We also used to throw peeled hard boiled eggs out the (ground level, floor to ceiling) windows in the winter and watch the ravens try to pick them up.

[MHesse]

At my step-daughter's school, Connecticut College, there was a rule that ice cream must be offered every day. It was a clause in a large alumnus bequest. Besides the main cafeteria, there was a 'healthy food' dining room in one dorm and vegetarian food dining in another dorm.

I went to college in NYC and lived at home. Food was good when I ate out, and familiar when I ate at home.

--mh

[bilrus]

The running joke among my friends was that after every dinner I would decide if I should have a bowl of chili or a bowl of Captain Crunch Crunchberries.

i lived on captain crunch with crunchberries and cheesesteaks at college. partly because the other food was just so bad, but mostly because i was usually stoned.

Was that my problem? Huh.

[SobaAddict70]

On the third floor of Hunter West (this is the nice "modern" looking building on the corner of East 68th Street and Lexington Avenue, the one outside the #6 train stop on 68th Street), is the infamous Hunter cafeteria. It's a full-service cafeteria which means they have everything from breakfast in the morning to dinner and snacks late in the evening.

I used to go there and get either pancakes and sausage or bagel sandwiches for breakfast, or salad/sandwiches and soup for lunch. Quite a steal since a lot of the meals are subsidized under the tuition plan.

After a few weeks of this, I learned quickly what to avoid and what not to pass up -- pretty much salads were ok except that the selection of vegetables ranged from poor to mediocre. Tomatoes were usually cherry tomatoes or tomato wedges, for example. Soups were all right, if one stuck to chicken noodle or lentil soup. Cream of broccoli was way oversalted. Pea soup, likewise.

Otoh, the falafel guy outside Hunter North (across 68th St), was a mainstay for much of my college career....all nine years of it. I was on the Nine Year Plan.

A side question I have for many of you is, how much were your meal plans and did you take advantage of them during your college careers? What is the typical meal plan now, how much does it cost, and is customization available? What kinds of cooking facilities (if any) are on campus, and do people take advantage of them?

Soba

[bloviatrix]

It's interesting you bring up this topic. There was an interesting piece in the Times on saturday about Yale starting a new initiative in their dining halls with the help of Alice Waters.

Yale - food

[KNorthrup]

A side question I have for many of you is, how much were your meal plans and did you take advantage of them during your college careers?  What is the typical meal plan now, how much does it cost, and is customization available?  What kinds of cooking facilities (if any) are on campus, and do people take advantage of them?

This is ten years ago. There were three meal plans -- 19 meals per week (sat/sun only had two), 14 per week, and 7 per week plus some amount of credit, I think about $250. If you lived in the dorms, a meal plan was 100% mandatory. With the credit, you could buy meals in the regular cafeteria, in the more traditional/edible pay type one in the student unions (burgers to order, etc), at the pizza by the slice place, the on-campus bar (we had one; I didn't realize until later that that's unusual), and the convenience store, which stocked all sorts of microwave-ready things and snacks. Most people got the full meal plan their first semester and quickly learned to switch to the one-a-day-plus-credit version. My brother is currently enrolled at the same place and the structure hasn't changed. Each dorm had one public microwave (none allowed in the rooms, technically) but no public fridge, sinks, stoves, etc.

[tryska]

Knorthurp's school sounds jsut like mine was.

[hannahcooks]

My freshman year in Cambridge I lived almost exclusively on three things: Whopper Jr.s or BLTs from the food court or falafel from the falafel truck on Mass Ave, still the best falafel I've ever had. The next year I transferred to school in Utah and can't remember once eating on campus. The best food I had in college was after moving into my sorority house- for a while we had a wonderful cook who was horrified by our requests for things like Mormon potatotes- I remember someone bringing him the recipe and his disbelief at the number of canned ingredients required.

[=Mark]

Went to school at West Virginia Wesleyan in the wild appalachians (Nearest liquor store and fast food was 17 miles away) 25 years ago. Cafeteria service was run by SAGA (Southern Appalachian Garbage Association), and you could see the progression from whole cuts of beast, to stews, then chopped and formed stuff (AKA "meat wads") and finally chili and spaghetti sauce (how is it that only cafeteria spaghetti sauce separates into tomato meat glop sitting on top with runny pink watery stuff sloshing across bottom of plate?).

They used to serve a "Continental Breakfast" on weekends with donuts, danish, fruit, milk and juices until 10am. We used to borrow a friends hunting jacket along with a couple quart jars and ziplock bags and load up with like 15 lbs. of supplies (Yeah, caught the eyes of some servers when one of us would load trays with a dozen glasses of juice and the other would get a dozen glasses of milk...). We supplied our group of buddies with unlimited free munchies for most of the weekend (Yeah, what tommy said)

Edited August 18, 2003 by =Mark (log)

[SobaAddict70]

If you lived in the dorms, a meal plan was 100% mandatory.

More asides:

Why was it mandatory? (Sorry if this is a silly question.)

Were there mess halls or large cafeteria and did people regularly go there? Could you, for instance, eat in your room? Were meal times regularly scheduled?

If someone had a craving at like 11 pm for a slice of pizza or a couple of pickle spears, was there a problem in fulfilling the craving?

Soba

[tommy]

Why was it mandatory?  (Sorry if this is a silly question.)

because many school programs would lose too much money if everyone opted out and decided to eat ramen and pizza in their dorms.

[KNorthrup]

I always figured it was a combination of to earn money and the whole in loco parentis thing. Prepaying for your meals guaranteed you wouldn't starve regardless of what other choices you made throughout the semester.

Food in rooms was completely allowed. So were fridges. And coffee pots. Just not microwaves. There was a traditional mess hall (Lola Tilly Commons after a home ec prof) with set meal times. Then there were also the half dozen satellite places that the general public could eat at as well -- the cafeteria in the student union, the pizza by the slice place, etc. They were usually open until at least 10 and I'm thinking more like 1am on the weekends. At worst, inconvenient timing wise, there was a 7-11 right outside campus limits, although that did mean at the base of a cliff so more of a trek than you'd expect. Esp at 40 below.

[Katherine]

There seems to be so much flexibility nowadays. When I first went to college (the only time I was a resident student) you had to buy the meal plan, which was the only one offered, meals were served at a set time, and the dorm was the only place food was served. We were not allowed food preparation or storage appliances in our rooms. My first dorm was a house, with a kitchen, which meant you could store things in the fridge, but other people would steal your food.

My daughter has a meal plan that gives her 10 meals a week, plus points that can be used at local fast food places that deliver to her dorm. Plus, she pretty much knows in advance which meals are worth eating and which should be skipped. So she can steal food in advance for the times when she knows there'll be nothing to eat.

[Malawry]

I attended Appalachian State University in Boone, NC. My college did not outsource its food service, which I always regarded as a good thing. The people who worked in the kitchens had been there for decades, knew and loved the students, and gave half a shit about the food. It was still mass-produced and a lot of it was dreck but there were some gems.

Students residing on-campus were required to subscribe to a meal plan. Meal plans were dollar amounts, and every food item had a price on it. Later in my college years they opened an all-you-can-eat line to appease students who wanted food in quantity; they charged like $6 for AYCE lunch or $8.50 for AYCE dinner, something like that. Vending machines on campus were on the meal plan, as were two small convenienece stores. (You could only buy food products with the meal plan, though; you couldn't buy notebook paper or shampoo or anything with it.)

I was a vegetarian in college, so my eating experiences were colored by this. My freshman year I was a new vegetarian and I subsisted primarily on grilled cheese sandwiches, salads and baked potatoes. My sophomore year they opened a VEGETARIAN LINE, though. I could get a gardenburger, a not-bad stir-fry over brown rice, a decent chickpea salad sandwich, and more. What a bonanza! The vegetarian line was lunch-only M-F, though, so at nights and on weekends I was stuck with the food court, the pizza delivery service and the Italian joint on the other end of campus. The food court was the most convenient and was a reliable spot for a taco salad and some sour patch kids. They featured hotel pans of this stuff called "dirt," a concoction including oreo cookie crumbs, vanilla pudding and whipped cream. This goop was sold in bulk and was wildly popular. I had a boyfriend who referred to the food court as "food bucket."

I also frequented the sub shop attached to the food court for veggie subs. I interviewed some guy in food service for a class project once and he was so proud of that sub shop. They'd designed their menu by going to Subway right off campus and seeing what they sold, and then they bought one of every sub, took them to a campus lab and weighed all of the ingredients.

OK, this is turning into a brain dump.

[dumpling]

It sounds funny to say but it was actually college and bologna that started me on my adventures with food. Before that for the most part all I had were the "healthy"(translation: no taste) meals of my parents. In college I went to the student deli and discovered their bologna hero. This thing was a behemoth! As long as a city block and the width of a sturdy man's arm. And the height! They must have, without exaggeration, sliced half a bologna to put on the one hero. It was Boar's Head, it was spring and I was in love. I realized that in buying this hero I was violating every one of my parent's rules to healthy eating-it had additives, salt, fat, no nutritional value, etc. That made it all the more exciting. It was through the transformative nature of that bologna that I began to realize the vastness of the culinary universe of the world, and my passionate dance with food had begun.

[rxrfrx]

Going to school in Portland I was fortunate enough to have a cafeteria operated by the prestigious Bon Apetit company. They actually managed to make decent cafeteria food, and one could always opt for a greasyass grilled sandwich if there wasn't anything else palatable.

Sometimes, however, they tried a little too hard to act "classy" ... One example that comes to mind is the night they served a "baby octopus salad," which was a plate of dry salad greens, topped off with exactly one half of a baby octopus, about the size of a big toe. It looked like a fetus and didn't taste like much. I think I did ultimately manage to choke it down, though.

[DVSDave]

I'm glad institutions across the nation are revamping their programs and offering more variety. Much better than thrice-recycled "soup." Bloody cryovac pouches reading "Meat fit for human consumption." Staffs of bread with a ripe. gooey bluey interior.

And let's not forget the eternal "ross bif" on the steamtable. That mean bastard had the powers of regeneration!

But most of all I apologize to my parents for paying my way into an institution of higher learning. And that learning what place had the best pizza was more important than learning the significance of Fibonacci numbers or some other stuff dealing with numbers.

Love Chicago!

[anil]

My freshman year in Cambridge I lived almost exclusively on three things: Whopper Jr.s or BLTs from the food court or falafel from the falafel truck on Mass Ave, still the best falafel I've ever had.  ......

Mass Ave. ? Where ? circa which yr ?

[sandra]

At Vassar we had students from the CIA cooking in the kitchens, and it wasn't great - the first time I saw a shovel of salt going into vat of soup....

There was always some type of strata, some kind of meat in sauce and some starch - never really good.

We had a broccoli endowment from a very former student (ex-girl's school, iron in broccoli, get it?) so there was broccoli at every meal, fried, boiled, soup, anything but steamed and crunchy!

We also always had a chest of ice cream that was full of these little bricks of ice cream that never melted fully, even after an hour in the sun, there was always a little bit left solid.... odd

Oh, and cereal, lots of cereal also - definitely crunchberries!

When they added the salad bar in my senior year it was great, it wasn't the best stuff, but at least it had not been cooked to death!

For breakfast they did have kaiser rolls with scrambled eggs, cheese and ham - not too bad

We also had to take the mealplan and eat our meals at the All Campus Dining Center (AC/DC) - we were not allowed to have fridges, hotplates or even kettles in our rooms, but I always had a fridge that I kept hidden amongst shoes in a closet - There I kept a tube of mayo, cold meats and cheeses, sometimes a little jar of caviar and Carrs crackers...

There was also a little fast food place in the Student Center where you could get grilled cheese, hamburgers, hot dogs,e tc... but that you had to pay for, no credits from your meal card... And of course, there was the Acropolis diner off campus - b/c sometimes we drank a few too many long island iced teas and had to get a gyro at 3am...

[jackal10]

A recent Guest Night menu in college (Emmanuel Cambridge).

I should point out that this is not everyday, but also not a grand feast. and it is high table food for the fellows, not undergraduate swill. Good food is one of the ways the college attracts the best talent.

Carpaccio of Venison with Parmsan Cups filed with Goats Cheese Mousse

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Pan Roasted Wild Mallard, Parsnip and Orange Puree, Bouquet of Seasonal vegetables

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Strawberry Sherbert with Rhubarb lightly poached in Jasmine Tea

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Coffee, Desert, and Petit four