From elementary school through college, students have had one consistent complaint: cafeteria food. I’ve eaten at UCLA. I’ve eaten at Tufts. I’m not going to lie: I was jealous of their fresh fruit spread, and I wasn’t thrilled about having to come back to UMass food. Known for such specialties as Trix pizza and cornflake macaroni and cheese, the UMass dining halls aren’t exactly five-star quality. However, I came to the realization this summer that they are not getting nearly as much credit as they deserve.
I spent the last ten days before I returned to school on a cruise around the Hawaiian Islands with my parents. We were trying out a new cruise line, NCL America, which is a division of Norwegian Cruise Lines. The line was just starting up and had only been running for about two months. They were trying out a new system called freestyle dining, which means that instead of having an assigned mealtime, vacationers could choose to eat at one of two main restaurants, one of three specialty restaurants or at a buffet-style self-serve location. These were all available for four-hour intervals three times a day. Well, it seemed like a good idea.
The first night on the boat, the restaurants were not open. Quite a few people went to the two main restaurants, and the rest, including my family, went to the buffet. The line must have been made up of 150-200 people and grew by the second. We stood there without moving for a while, moved about a foot, and then continued to stand for some time again. In all, I think it took us about 30 minutes to get to the front of the line, at which point I discovered that the main course offerings consisted of hamburgers, hotdogs and ribs. I don’t eat red meat. My long-awaited meal consisted of half a cold corn on the cob and a cheese and pickle sandwich.
The buffet system was very similar to that of the dining halls on campus. You come in, get your tray and stand in line. You take your food and go find a seat. I’ve never stood in a line in the dining hall for more than five minutes. Maybe 10 minutes on lobster night. I’m not sure exactly what the problem was on the boat, but the lines moved beyond sluggishly, and the potato product and cold fish I ended up getting for just about every lunch and dinner really wasn’t worth the wait. It got to the point where my father, a diabetic, was eating dessert nearly every night and taking extra insulin because there just wasn’t anything else to eat.
I’ve done my fair share of complaining about the dining hall food, but they always have a sandwich bar, a pasta bar, a waffle maker and salad. They also always have a vegetarian option. Furthermore, the cost of my one-year school meal plan was substantially less than the cost of this cruise. At one point, I had a discussion with the cruise director about implementing a system similar to UMass’ grab-n-go on the boat. When in port we would leave the boat for excursions, and if we didn’t get up two hours early, we wouldn’t be able to get breakfast before we left. If they had packs of cereal, pastries, bagels, coffee, etc. available, it would have been very convenient.
The director sort of shrugged me off, saying that some of the longer excursions provided meals for their guests. I don’t know about the other dining halls, but I know Worcester hangs their student comment cards on a bulletin board near the entrance and tries to take all suggestions into account. A similarity between the dining halls on campus and the cruise was that they both offered ice cream every day. The difference? The dining halls offer soft-serve and hard ice cream pretty much from the middle of breakfast until the end of dinner. The boat offered it from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m., but ran out every day around 4 p.m.
Eventually, the main and specialty restaurants opened, and people stood outside waiting for anywhere between one and three hours for a table, whether or not they had reservations, and then waited about an hour at their table to get their food. At the specialty restaurants, they were paying as much as $15 extra per person for this poor service. My family and I heard this and decided not even to bother, because as bad as the buffet was, three hours was a lot more than the 30 minutes to an hour it took to get through the buffet. Luckily, about halfway through the cruise, we began traveling at night and people were too nauseous to eat, which provided a bit more restaurant space. We ate at one of the main restaurants on our last night on the boat. It was certainly nothing special.
By the fourth or fifth day on the boat, I was proudly telling people that I was a college student and was very much looking forward to returning to my school’s dining hall food. As much as we may complain about the food offered here, we really do have a decent selection, and we can get our food quickly and be on our way. That cruise has given me a newfound appreciation for such delicacies as Trix pizza and cornflake macaroni and cheese. The Trix pizza is hot, the macaroni and cheese vegetarian and the ice cream plentiful. For that, I am eternally thankful.
Stacy Kasdin is a Collegian columnist.
