We have published many articles critizing Sodexho’s food services here at Lewis. We mostly point out the lack of healthy food choices or ridiculously high prices that we as students pay. Today, we at the Flyer, want to address the food service in general, and how it fails to meet the needs of the students who are forced to use it. And yes I mean forced.
Every resident student knows that a food plan is a mandatory part of the bill to live on campus. We are required to have a meal plan to live in the dorms. It is not an option. We have a choice, between three different levels, of how much money we want to put on our meal plan, but we must have a meal plan. That being, you would think that we would be able to use this money that we invest in our living budget at anytime to get food, right? Well those who live on campus know that is just not the way it is.
Photo courtesy of http://cliffmitchell.wordpress.com
There are many times that there are zero dining facilities open on campus. (Of course I am excluding the C-store which is open 24/7, but who wants to eat TV dinners and beef jerky all the time. I am pretty sure the FDA wouldn’t consider ice cream, candy bars and bruised apples to be a good and balanced meal.) Hours go by every Saturday and Sunday when there is nowhere that a resident student can use the meal money that they are required to have. So if we are hungry at 9 in the morning on a Sunday and want a meal we either have to wait till 11 for the continental breakfast provided in the cafe, go to the C-store for microwavable sandwiches or go off campus and use our other money, not the money we have already invested into our living expenses. It would be nice if we could cash out some of that prepaid money to go get a nice meal early on a Sunday or midday on Saturday when nothing is open. But there is a strict “no cash out” policy with the meal plans.
So many residents accumulate massive amounts of money on their meal plan by the end of the semester; there is only so much cold cereal and pre-made salads that one can eat before enough is enough, and you have to get a real meal.
Students end up with a stock pile of cash on their meal plan, even if they are on the smallest meal program. Which they can do one of three things with; one, help their starving counterpart, students with large appetites constantly go hungry because of the high prices of food on campus, Two, buy bulk amounts of Gatorade at the end of the semester, but at above retail price not at bulk rate (it hurts to pay $45 for a case of Gatorade, which would cost $6.50 at Sam’s), or the third option; just give their excess back to the university. This is what happens when you have money left on your meal card at the end of the year, because of the strict no cash out policy. Lewis just takes a nice little donation. And to say little is stretching it, some students have amounts up to $1200 left on their meal plans, which the University just absorbs into their coffers.
ur money is just going right into the hands of the University one way or the other, and we aren’t even getting a reliable service for the money that we are forced to spend. People go hungry; we are forced to eat cold/microwavable food, and to eat out even though we have already invested thousands in a meal plan on campus. And we use the money whether we spend it or not. There is a word in the English language to describe the food service here at Lewis, and that word is SCAM.
We simply are not getting what we are paying for. Since we HAVE to have a meal plan, we should be able to get a meal, not a “meal”, whenever we want. If it is required to pay the University no matter what, we require a full service for the money we have to pay.
The Lewis Flyer
PDF 
