The Tartan

It’s really a blessing to have all of your daily needs within walking distance. There’s a lot of things to love about campus living, but sometimes our food options leave a lot to be desired. That’s right, this week the editorial board decided to tackle the topic of campus dining.

There are a lot of really great choices for food on campus, but there is a ubiquitous offering that, depending on your location and the time of day, is effectively the default option. Burgers, fries, and pizza are always available in great abundance, and those are wonderful things to have when eating out. But restaurant food is supposed to be a once-every-so-often endeavor; when you’re a first-year living on Morewood with naught but Stack’d Underground available late in the evening, that sort of greasy fare might be a daily occurrence. While the stories of first-years getting scurvy are (hopefully) a myth, it’s not outrageous to ask that vegetables and fruit be easier to come by.

This also poses an issue for people with allergies or dietary restrictions, who might find that the food they can eat is offered very sparsely, if at all. 

In discussing our eating habits, the sole first-year (sitting at a table of wizened and wrinkled third-years) asked, “Well, what have you started to eat now that you’re off the meal plan?” It was generally agreed that the best tactic is to make a large bucket of slop (or your preferred kind of homogeneous food mixture) to be doled out in portions throughout the week. Though actual adherence to healthy eating habits is of course not guaranteed once one is off the meal plan, it certainly becomes a lot easier to do so. Additionally, the recent advent of Scotty’s Market has done wonders for our ability to access fresh foods. 

Putting aside the actual content of the food, we began discussing the physical layout of our campus dining system. Unlike most universities, Carnegie Mellon does not have a centralized dining hall and opts instead for a distributed takeout-restaurant style system. This gives us a wide range of interesting options, but there is something to be said for the cafeteria. 

A big cafeteria becomes the social center of a university. The long Hogwarts-style tables (where you are bound to sit with some strangers) make it easier to meet new people. Also, if you go there alone and run into some distant friends, it feels less intrusive to sit with them. The communal dining experience is a joy, as those of us who have spent time at other schools attested.

But that’s really hard to do at Carnegie Mellon. Many of the places to sit and eat are scattered about, the tables tend to sit between two and six people, and many of those are occupied by one person with their headphones in. (We’ve all spent a lonesome lunch hour doing homework over a bowl of Gallo. The vibe can get a little depressing.) Carnegie Mellon students have a bad reputation of being asocial, and the dining situation doesn’t help.

Most places sell their food in take-out containers, which we eat with plastic forks. These are thankfully compostable, but they feel a lot less home-y than actual dishes and utensils. And as the mountain of garbage on top of the trash cans in Resnik attests, this practice produces quite a lot of waste. 

This also gives you the option to take your container of food and eat it in your room. Our takeout system makes the process of getting food impersonal and isolating, not to mention that with Grubhub enabled at most places, you can get a meal without talking to another human.

Granted, space is a premium on our campus, and the layout of our buildings makes it a lot more reasonable to have a bunch of small takeout places rather than a big dining hall. But we here at the EdBoard came up with a whole one or two ideas for where a dining hall could (probably) fit; plus it helps that the university doesn’t mind spending wheelbarrows of cash on new projects. The benefits of renovating the UC to get a dining hall could well be worth what it represents as an investment into students’ well-being.