RACKHAM: Food For Thought

After having lunch at the George Sherman Union too many times to count the past couple of weeks, I finally trek across the street to Warren Towers (which is the second largest non-military dormitory in the country. Thank you, Boston University tour guides). Anyway, as I stand in the line that curves around too many walls and corners, I wonder what selection of food they will have for me. I don’t even know why I’m thinking about it, seeing as how I already know what it will be: pizza, burgers, french fries, mac ’n cheese, vegan rice dish, stir-fry and burritos. Basically, the same thing they have every day.
Having already accepted the fact that I will be having a chicken burrito, I hop into the next available line. Burrito in hand, I stand in the middle of the dining hall looking around for a place to sit. After 10 minutes of walking around from seating area to seating area, I finally give up and decide to stand awkwardly until someone gets up.
Unfortunately, this happens way too often at BU dining halls during peak eating hours. Especially during the accepted student’s weekends when mass amounts of parents and high school students swarm into the dining halls and get their very own section that BU has roped off for them. The result is that current students end up having to sit on the floor or eat while standing up at the expense of the students that they are trying to get to come to their school.
I honestly don’t see any positives in this plan of theirs. On the one hand, they are annoying us because we have nowhere to sit, and on the other hand, they aren’t really impressing parents by showing them a dining hall that can’t fit most of their students.
This brings me to what I want BU to change the most about their dining halls, and it’s not the addition of more seats. We are in desperate need of take-out boxes so that when the dining hall is jammed packed with students, we have the option to get our food to go. Currently, our options are to eat in and that’s it. We actually get yelled at if we try and take food out of the dining hall. I personally don’t think that I should be chased down if I want to take a sandwich back to my room.
Sometimes it’s nice to have the option of to-go meals. What if you want to catch some sun and eat outside? Or what if none of your friends can make it to dinner and you don’t want to sit by yourself? Or what if there is a meeting that you can’t miss, but you have to grab food first? The solution to all of these scenarios is a to-go box. It’s as a simple and easy as that. I think you can take it from here, BU.