When a friend of Communication freshman Wally Xie asked him for advice on switching meal plans, Xie’s eyes lit up as the memory of a whole quarter’s difficult search for enough food was revived.
“Oh, I totally remember that Block D I switched to,” Xie said. “I starved for the whole quarter — I was not getting enough food because I could only eat one meal a day. So this quarter I switched to Weekly 13 — and now I am finally eating.”
Northwestern claims an average of $230 profit on every Weekly 13 plan, even if each student takes full advantage of their plan. With the basic Weekly 13 plan providing hardly two meals and $0.41 points per day, why does Northwestern start freshmen off on a meal plan that is heavy on the wallet and light in available nutrition?
Alexander Gurvits, a Weinberg freshman on the Weekly 13 plan, finds that none of the meal plans are ideal.
“The meal plans are all a bit annoying,” he said over his lunch at 1835 Hinman. “This Weekly 13 — if you eat two meals a day, that will be 14. They are either too much or too little. There is not a perfect one.”
Students can’t even eat breakfast if they are trying to make the most of their meal plans. For someone without a meal plan, dinner costs $10, lunch is $8 and breakfast is $6. So someone on the Weekly 13 who eats breakfast at the dining halls would be practically throwing money away.
To combat hunger, most students have the experience of “smuggling” food out of dining halls to save for later and make up for meals they are missing in their plans.
“Instead of buying fruits from supermarkets, I just take the apples from [the] school’s dining halls,” said Weinberg freshman Andrea Hadjopulos, who is on the Weekly 13 meal plan.
Whole Foods and other off-campus eateries become a dietary supplement for students to keep up with nutrition and energy, adding even more to the already-astronomical cost of staying fed and healthy at Northwestern.
“I eat many times during the day, so I have to eat out a lot. I am spending a lot of money on food,” Hadjopulos said over a salad at Whole Foods.
The ideal meal plan varies from student to student. While a block plan did not work for Xie, Weinberg freshman Wilson Funkhouser has found it a better use of his money.
“In weekly plans, if you don’t use it up in the week, you lose it. I like block plans — the meals carries [sic] on to the next week,” said Funkhouser.
Block plans have an advantage because meals can be distributed throughout the quarter according to the student’s preference.
But even Block D, with its flexibility, can’t begin to fulfill the recommended nutrition for young adults. Some students on block plans say that the number of meals is still too limited, providing only between five and nine meals and between $7.36 and $26.90 in points per week. This means that students may not plan ahead, and find themselves with too few at the end of the quarter.
“I ate too much at the start of the quarter, so I had to starve myself for two weeks. So there was a time when I was hungry every day,” Xie said.
The Block plans are still an atrocious rip-off, financially. For Block D, using every point and converting all 74 meals to points at the highest equivalency rate, $8.50, only comes out to $788.
Block D costs $1,374, so where does the extra $588 go? University Housing and Food Service liaison Anne Vanosdel would not comment on how the University used the extra money.
Using a meal on Block D is no more financially beneficial: once all of the points are used, each meal used comes out to $16 of the plan’s cost — $4 more than dinner for non-residents, the most expensive meal offered in the dining halls.
According to Vanosdol, meal plans were decided by both the University Board and a student committee. The plans, especially the block plans, were “a direct result of the student committee’s input and desire to have portability and flexibility.”
Vanosdol said that Sodexho was chosen because it offered the greatest quality of food at the best price possible.
“And yes, I believe that the team that we have here on campus is the gold standard when it comes to food service providers,” she said.
But raise your hand if you think you ate a gold-standard breakfast today — was it worth the $10 – $17 you probably paid?