Ideally, the purpose of college is preparing students for the future. We learn and mature as capable adults that can lead the world.
Yet, there is one great hindrance at Stony Brook University: the sickening meals. We pay from a range of $1,500 for the Bronze plan, the cheapest one on campus, to $2,324 for the Platinum, the most expensive, and yet we only receive a fraction of the value in return. Is this one of SBU’s lessons for us, the future leaders, to acknowledge the fact that normal food is an expensive delicacy?
Most people require three meals a day at the minimum. The word “meal” is used loosely here at Stony Brook. What we want is usually not what is served, even if it is fully visible behind the transparent plastic food-shield. Have you ever paid a ridiculous price for a meal that feels as if it’s been put together by scraps of leftover? I personally have encountered this several times.
A notorious suspect is the beef commonly served in Campus Connection at H Quad. I have come across “beef” so rough and full of tendons that it is literally not capable of being chewed through (or at least, you will wind up with some very pleasant bits and pieces stuck in the cavities of your teeth).
On another night, one might see the entire “beef stew” and eagerly order it only to find that chunks of meat are a mere illusion — they are just pieces of bones. There are also problems with the side orders in H Quad. Time and time again, I find myself biting through half-cooked, hard, crunchy rice or slurping through watered-down “steamed vegetables.”
The food crisis does not merely reside in H Quad. The same bones-disguised-as-meat and half-cooked-rice problems can be found in Jasmine when you order chicken or sushi. We also have soggy pizza served at the SAC or Kelly Dining Center which most of us blindly overlook by applying garlic, peppers, or other spices.
On top of all these problems, our campus foods are ALL layered with an incredible amount of excessive oil. This gives us the illusion that perhaps the food tastes good and is actually worth our money. Next time you eat, consider looking down at your plate — you just might find your reflection.
Yet, we continue to eat these foods. We simply cannot live without food and SBU knows it and will use it against us. Aside from paying for tuition, room and board, and overpriced textbooks, we are required to spend tens of hundreds for this ludicrous meal plan. Many commuters even sign up for the commuter plan for the tax-reduction in the few times they have to eat on campus. We are to simply wonder where our money actually goes.
For the same money we spend using our Campus Points and Flex Credits, we can get a higher quality and more gratuitous amount of food anywhere outside of campus. A single cup of cereal and milk bought here in SBU would cost the same as a whole box of the same cereal bought in a supermarket.
Should we sit here while the university launders our food money for unknown reasons? Perhaps we should ask them to stop spending money on the vats of oil they use in our food.
