Dining for first-year students

When first-years step into Vermillion, you can bet they are all enamored by the multiple options to dine on campus. Soon enough though, students find themselves asking, is there really anything to eat that won’t give them heart disease?

The location options to dine at are simple, but how about the selection once you are there. Most students can agree the options are at first appetizing. A college student getting to choose between pizza, cheeseburgers and pasta every day sounds about as good as it gets. But soon enough you realize these selections add up to one thing: the freshman 15.

The University isn’t on the right track as far as providing healthy food options. The university could really enhance what they have to offer with a few more healthy options. Sure, we could all eat a salad and a sandwich, but there has to be more variety to keep students coming back.

A final issue with the current eating structure is the meal plans.

The University of South Dakota currently offers a variety of meal plans, ranging from 80 meals a semester to 17 meals a week. As a first-year, the school literally forces you to choose one of their decided plans, with the cheapest one being $1,294.85 a semester, so be ready to spend your money.

Given the expense, you hope to be able to choose from a variety of places, right? Well, that’s not totally true. As of now, the university offers one place a day to use your meals. During the week, you must go to the north complex and eat at the Commons and during the week your choice is at the Muenster University Center.

And when these options get tiresome, we all would hope to believe we could opt out of our meal plan. The school gives you a set amount of money that you spend on food, and while we all could complain about the high prices or lack of quality, it’s safe to say we should be able to dictate what we are spending on food. If you are paying for 10 meals a week, you better use all 10, because if you don’t, the money is currently going straight to the university.

But hey, we live and we learn.