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Volume 130, Number 1 |
July 14, 2009 |
Ed/Op
Editorial Notebook
Save money, cook for yourself
Life without Commons food proves to be a viable alternative
Posted 09-25-2002 at 2:23PM
Vidhu S. Pandey
Photo Editor
In the course of an academic year here at RPI, a student, on average, consumes between 500 and 1,000 pounds of food. Taking into consideration the cost of a meal plan, the numbers come out to between $3 and $6 per pound, up to forty times the cost of gasoline per unit mass. Does this mean we’d be better off buying gas instead of food? No, it doesn’t. Although inhalation of gasoline fumes induces a mildly painful yet exotically stimulating headache, it is an inviable fuel source for the human body. However, it does mean that you are paying too much for food, and that you’re better off without a meal plan.
My freshman year, which ended all of four months ago, involved a meal plan rife with bad, expensive food, poor service, and meatloaf laden with little chips of bone that, once chewed, threatened to wreak havoc and terror on one’s teeth. Towards the end of the year, as I was pondering dinner one day, I realized that a meal plan costs an average of $14 per day—yes, a large discount from the prices charged to non-meal plan people that ring up on dining hall cash registers, but a great amount nonetheless. $14 is not that much money, but it comes out to almost $100 in a week and about $1500 in a semester. Thinking about these items, and a nasty piece of gristle stuck in my teeth from lunch, I decided it would be a grand opportunity to save myself some money and experience a culinary paradise this year by not getting a meal plan. I haven’t regretted it.
Now, as my suitemates dutifully troop off to the Commons for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I am able to make myself pot roasts, chicken, and a ham currently scheduled for this Sunday. Cooking is not a necessary part of being off a meal plan, but it does help. You get far cheaper food and it tastes decently good. Although it may look somewhat effeminate running up four flights of stairs with a roast chicken as the baking pan burns through your flowery oven mitts, it does look quite attractive to the opposite sex. For those who do not cook, or are sometimes forced by classes, stress, and the unquestionable force of laziness not to, even getting delivery every day is more economic and tasty than being on a meal plan.
For those of you who do not have a meal plan, I applaud you; for the freshmen who are bound to one for the remainder of the year, I urge you to join us in fending for ourselves next year; and for the rest of you, be strong, be tough, and cook. |
