It's week two of Winter term, and you're in the library finishing up your reading for the night. You realize you're hungry, but one look at Accuweather kills any desire you might have had to make the trek to Collis. Instead, you head down to King Arthur Flour, praying that you won't be in line for half an hour. Instead, you find it's pretty empty odd for 6 p.m. on a Tuesday and you make it to the counter in five minutes.
Time to decide what you want to eat! But forget trying to get a brie and apple sandwich, spreads, any kind of salad or tortellini. KAF doesn't have real food after 4 p.m. As you survey what remains, you realize you have enough pastries at your disposal to send you into a diabetic coma but nothing that can really count as dinner. Your best shot is either a cold wild mushroom empanada or a ham and cheese croissant. Yum! Just get some rolls with butter and go back to your work.
Life's rough. KAF has longer lines than Greenprint during finals period. I've been forced to buy a chicken salad sandwich from Novack more times than I can count because I didn't have time to wait for the slowest moving line of the century. And you know what else sucks about KAF? It is impossibly far from some parts of the library! I mean, if you're on stacks level seven? Forget about it! You should have just stocked up at Topside beforehand. And it's so expensive. Delicious and relatively healthy sandwiches, good coffee and really good cupcakes/tarts/sticky buns should not cost me more than $5 of my already-paid-for-and-won't-roll-over-so-I-have-to-spend-it-all-anyway money. Have I covered all the bases yet?
KAF may not be the best target of our self-righteous whining, but the meal plan absolutely is. I'm not going to go into the business about how JYK didn't consult us or question DDS's profitability, but ask almost any Dartmouth student and you will get a laundry list of genuine complaints: $200 of Topside money slashed from the meal plan, no rollover of DBA, a meal swipe system that forces you to go to FoCo if you want your money's worth. It goes on and on.
I have no problem with the new FoCo. Epiphany: The only reason everybody hates it so much is because it was introduced at the same time as the new meal plan, so getting ripped off and the new space are all wrapped up in everybody's heads. I'm guilty of this too I was totally bitter and having separation anxiety from old FoCo (I promise not to bring up Homeplate or the sandwich bar, that's totally played out even if everyone is right and the new paninis barely measure up), but after eating there once a day for a term, I realized the food is actually good. So stop bitching about it.
They tell you this on the tour and I chalked it up to PR, but when it comes to food we are actually better off than a ton of schools. I have some friends who attend state schools in New York, where state schools and prisons contract with the same food companies. Prisons. So yeah, the vegan shepherd's pie is a little weird and the Hop can get a little too greasy, but at least we're not eating the same slop as the mass murderers of New Hampshire!
There are, however, a ton of legitimate problems with the meal plan. I'll bet you didn't know that at Columbia, dining dollars roll over until graduation. I previously believed that they cut you a check when you graduated they don't, I later learned but how nice would that be? If you're not required to buy a meal plan, you could totally spend all of your money during senior spring without having to buy dozens of crates of Vitamin Water. Imagine that! I had $300 of DBA left on my plan with two weeks of the term to go, and although I got rid of most of it by buying food for my friends with negative DBA, I still had to spend $300 in two weeks.
The meal plan equivalencies are another oft-complained about aspect of the plans that literally rob students of their money. I'll use SmartChoice5 as an example it costs $1,440 per term. Of that, $875 is DBA, meaning that the remaining 50 meals (assuming a 10-week term) cost $11.30 each. Even if you use a dinner meal swipe at Collis or the Hop, you are still losing $1.55 a meal, which adds up to $77.50 per term. It's not an extravagant amount, but it's still around five percent of what you paid for the meal plan in the first place. But hey, if you ever need to spend extra DBA, brave the KAF line and buy yourself a cake! You're officially $34 closer to zero!
So yeah, we whine a lot. Sometimes a lot of what we think is wrong with Dartmouth is just a bunch of silly complaints, but every so often we have worthwhile things to complain about. We complain about KAF because it's human nature to find fault with things that are pretty good. We are a school of strong traditions, and when something changes on us and doesn't live up to our expectations, it's upsetting. But when it comes to the meal plan, I don't think this holds up. Of all the complaints I've heard about the new plan, none are sentimental or relevant to some sense of disrupted tradition most come down to the old saying, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." It wasn't just a small percentage of the student body that liked the "1,000 Students Against the New Dartmouth DDS Meal Plan" page on Facebook, and if that's not an indication that we have legitimate concerns about the meal plan, I don't know what is. After all, no one's hating on KAF.
