Dining at Enema U

Let me start by giving you the best advice about eating at Enema U:  Don’t. 

If you live on campus (which is a requirement for new students), there is one large cafeteria where students are treated like cattle at feed lot shortly before the slaughter.  I can state this with some authority because Enema U is the state agricultural college and I’m an alumnus.  I am absolutely positive that the college feeds its livestock better than its students.

This is where a few of my readers will start writing me hate mail.  “When I was at college they only fed us K-Rations left over from the war with Japan….”

Whenever campus food or campus parking are mentioned, some senior faculty member immediately responds with a story about how much worse it was when he attended the University of Bedrock.  I’m sure that what the faculty member is stating is probably factually correct.  I’m also sure that such comparisons are asinine.  In a day of shrinking enrollments and rising costs, Enema U is competing for students, and any businessman will tell you that if your customer believes there is a problem, then there is a problem.

There are many universities—even state universities—that have decided that one way to attract more students is to cater to their needs and wants, and good food is definitely among the things that students desire.  A few campuses even brag about the chefs supervising their dining rooms.  I found a university that even encourages the parents of students to suggest recipes to the cafeteria staff.  

Perhaps the best review of the cafeteria is that you will almost never find anyone from the administration eating there.  I walked through the cafeteria three times this week and only once observed two faculty members sitting with some students.  

A few years ago, Enema U sent me to BYU for a week to study the language lab there—a computerized set of classrooms that aided the instruction of foreign languages.  While I slept at a nearby hotel, I soon learned to take my meals on campus.  The cafeteria was large and featured a wide variety of food from around the world, and everything I sampled was excellent, particularly the fresh sushi.  

To be fair, it is easier to get a good cup of coffee at Enema U than at BYU, where the longest cafeteria line was for the “Water Station”, located in the middle of the cafeteria.  Contrast this with Enema U, where the administration recently removed all the drinking fountains in or near the cafeteria to force students to purchase drinks.  How much additional income could the university possibly hope to make from this?  

The problem is that the university believes that students are an endless source of income, a resource that can be strip mined without consequences.  In economics, they call this static scoring, where you pretend that raising prices will have no effect on customer behavior.  Actually, raising prices and generally mistreating the consumer will make them more likely to go to a competitor that will offer them a better deal.  In the case of Enema U, there are already universities across the border in Texas offering in-state tuition to New Mexico students.

So, who is responsible for the bad dining on campus?  The university has leased our bookstore to a company that doesn’t seem to want to sell books and has leased out the cafeterias to a company that only barely knows how to produce an edible meal.  In the case of the cafeterias, they have a contract with Sodexo, a company that focuses on the business of providing food for prisons, airports, and universities.  I have no direct evidence, but I suspect the food at prisons is better than at the universities for the simple reason that students are less likely to shank you.

According to a Niche Magazine survey of university food across the United States, Sodexo ran some of the worst university cafeterias in the nation—a distinction in itself that should have been sufficient for the administration to never consider turning over cafeteria services to such a company.  Sodexo, by the way, is a French company, so the profits from selling swill to students goes back to its home office in Paris.  Somebody, get a rope!

At Enema U, if you choose to dine in the student cafeteria, the first thing you will notice is that they no longer provide trays so as to limit the amount of food you can select from the self-service buffets.  There is not a lot of variety to choose from and the limited menu repeats every three days.  The condiments are also very limited, being served out of those big pumps that always remind me of the grease gun I used to lube my pickup.  On weekends, the cafeterias open late and close early.  And since university that frequently talks about sustainability and being environmentally conscious, why are most of the meals seemed to be served on Styrofoam?  

Try to imagine you are an incoming freshman going to that cafeteria for the first time.  As you stand in the middle of the noisy cafeteria, you imagine eating the same meals every third day for the next four years.   Then try to imagine you still want to be a student at Enema U.  Yeah, sure!