The Orleans Room. A place where most students rely on their daily meals. One of the most important aspects of the university experience, but also one of the most unfair.
As students, we invest a lot of our time and money to be able to fully immerse ourselves in the college experience. One of these investments is the meal plans we pay for, designed to provide us with easy and convenient access to food while we deal with our hectic academic and personal schedules.
However, I believe it’s time to face the facts and realize that there are some inconsistencies between what a dining hall is meant to do and what our dining hall imposes on us.
With the amount of money we pay for our meal plans, we are victims of unnecessary policies implemented by the university: the inability to take food out of the Orleans Room.
This policy goes completely against what a meal plan is meant to do. If we are paying for the food with a meal swipe when we come in, why are we not allowed to simply take our meals outside? This restriction is not only incredibly nonsensical, but it also fails to acknowledge the realities of college life.
Since the OR works on a very specific schedule, sometimes students are in class when the dining hall is open, and by the time their class is over, the dining hall is already closed.
The policy also fails to recognize that a lot of students have schedules that are packed with other commitments, and forcing students to remain in the shackles of the OR for meals is unrealistic and inconvenient.
Whether the need for taking food outside the premises be because of a previous commitment, a dietary restriction, or simply wanting to enjoy your food in another atmosphere, the university should recognize that they are imposing on students by forcing them to adhere to the dining hall schedule and its rules.
Moreover, it’s not like being allowed to take food from the dining hall means that we will be taking food from other students. Since the OR workers are the ones that serve most plates, we won’t even be deciding our own portions. Plus, if you’re dining in the OR, you’re able to take more than one plate from any station, so why not implement that for takeout food?
To let you know why this problem irks me so much, let me tell you the experience me and my friends had. The one and only time I’ve attempted to take food from the OR was because one of my friends was sick, and we wanted to bring her some food, so that she didn’t have to spend money ordering anything.
We thought that, since the OR has a take out option on the Everyday app, that it would be fine to bring our own food containers and take what was served to us by one of the workers.
The moment we began putting the food in the container, we were yelled at, as if we were little kids and made to throw away the food we were planning on taking. This is not only wasteful but completely unfair.
To remedy this, the university should take these points into consideration and create new policies that would allow for us to take food from the dining hall, albeit, with reasonable limits.
Doing this would result in a happier student body and a more enjoyable dining experience.
