By Sydney Swift | Guest Contributor
As a freshman, purchasing a meal plan is required, and since my parents are paying for those meals, they obviously want me to eat in the dining halls. I, on the other hand, avoid going there at all costs.
On Baylor Dining’s website, you can read about the amenities the dining halls offer. It is very obvious that Baylor takes great pride in the on-campus dining by posting informational facts around the dining hall and online. I browsed through all the different tabs and came across a very interesting one: “Eat Well.”
Baylor commits to having many different varieties on their dining hall menus. The slogan is “We’re committed to providing you a broad selection of great-tasting, healthy food and beverages.” They continue on saying they will always have fresh fruit and veggies, and that they are proud to serve culturally diverse meals. It mentions multiple times that Baylor strives to have diverse options to sustain a healthy diet for college students.
I love going out to eat, and unfortunately in college I am on a budget and am unable to eat out for every meal. I would love to have just a nice home-cooked meal, and I do feel like that is what Baylor dining halls are striving to do, but it is just not the same thing. The “variety” in the dining halls is some pizza, stir fry, salads and sandwiches. Besides the dining halls, options are Chick-fil-a, Panda Express, Moo-yah, Which Wich, etc. You can only repeat the same meals so many times before you get sick of them.
Yes, there is variety in the sense of all the different flavors and stations, but the options at each station seem to rotate on a cycle, so it is just the same “Wing Wednesday” or PB&J week after week. I also tend to be a picky eater, so it is already hard for me to find things to eat and scarce options do not help that. The rubbery meat scares me, so I do not eat that; I am tired of the fruits and vegetables, so basically I rely on pizza or a bowl of cereal. Then about an hour later, I am hungry again and the cycle repeats itself. It is awesome that Baylor does provide us with multiple dining halls that offer different things and do have the nutrients students need, but I, along with many of my friends, believe there should just be more variety.
At this point in the year, I usually choose to microwave something (that I had to buy, sorry Mom and Dad) rather than going to eat on campus, which is why I have over 900 meals left on my meal plan. Once again, sorry Mom and Dad.
That being said, Baylor does provide great on-campus dining, but the dining halls could use a little more rotational variety. Even coming from a picky eater, throw something crazy in there just to change it up.
