<p>Long story short, the food at UChicago is mandatory if you want to live on campus, is not quality food and if you have diet restrictions it's inedible, and dining areas fail an incredible amount of health inspections (bugs, mice droppings, etc.)</p>
<p>The likely/accepted explanation for that many students agree with is that the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of ARAMARK, the food provider, also sits on the UChicago board and naturally helps negotiate the food contract so it gets renewed every time. Anyway the school is great and all but expect to have a strong motivation to shop for/cook your own food in addition to avoiding the grub you pay 5 grand a year for.</p>
<p>The school hasn't responded to current students the last couple of years because the corruption is too great but maybe if these issues are voiced on a forum where potential freshmen are recruited there might be enough impetus for change.</p>
<p>Have you dined at any of the dining halls for a long period of time? Admit weekend or tour doesn’t count. How do you know campus food at UChicago “sucks” and is “not quality food” if you are an incoming freshman and not a current student?</p>
<p>Recent grad here. Spent four years in the dining hall. I’ve also eaten at Penn, Stanford, and Harvard. I actually think UChicago’s dorm food is far better. (Seriously, have you eaten at Penn!?) Needless to say, all recent petitions (including the one listed above) asking the University to terminate its contract with Aramark or switch to Bon Appetit fail to garner sufficient signatures or attention. I can’t say I’m surprised because I haven’t heard many complaints about the food. (The big fuss seems to stem from a few vocal, and I think rather spoiled individuals on campus.)</p>
<p>You’re honestly going to tell me that these dirty ‘clean/fresh/new’ plates and cups sometimes with bugs in them are quality dining? Not to mention how supposedly vegan food has bits of bacon in it.</p>
<p>Have you dined at any of the dining halls for a long period of time? Admit weekend or tour doesn’t count. How do you know campus food at UChicago “sucks” and is “not quality food” if you are an incoming freshman and not a current student?</p>
<p>Also, I am a vegan, and I had no problem eating at the dining halls for four years.</p>
<p>People on this forum are way more defensive of Uchicago than your average U of C undergraduate. one of my primary reasons for moving out of the dorms after first year is the horrible quality and ridiculous price of the dining plan. Yeah, some schools are probably worse, and I admit that I was a bit spoiled, but the food sucks and could easily be better not to mention all the health code violations. i can’t imagine eating the dining hall food for 4 years</p>
<p>UChicago students love to complain just about everything in the universe, about how CTA is so awful (you’d be begging for CTA if you lived on the West Coast), about how school shuttles are a few minutes late (seriously?), about Chicago’s supposedly “brutal” weather (which averages 2550 hours of sunshine per year - same as the Big Apple, Boston, and Philly - so awful right?), about how expensive the rents are (which are the cheapest among all major American cities).</p>
<p>Stanford has an awful record (a lot worse than UChicago) when it comes to health violations. Meal plans are also mandatory there and cost $300 more per year. However, I have yet to hear my Stanford pals complaining about their dining experiences.</p>
<p>I have an idea. Why don’t all of us stop complaining and be thankful of what we have? How about that? If you don’t like dorm food, you can vote with your wallet after your freshman year and live off-campus.</p>
<p>Preemptive disclaimer: I am not affiliated with the admissions office in any capacity. I’m simply FED UP with how sheltered many of my UChicago peers are.</p>
<p>You might be angry after reading this post, but you’ll understand just how fortunate you have been all along after you graduate and leave Hyde Park.</p>
<p>I’m off. To the OP, I wish you the very best of luck in the next three to four years. Enjoy the ride!</p>
<p>I do agree that people complain way to much here, but it happens at every school. Although it would be nice for the CTA busses to run during the day in the summers so that I dont have to be drenched in sweat after walking to campus</p>
<p>I don’t even see why discussion of other schools needs to come into play here. All you have to do is look at how much you’re paying and what you’re getting when it comes to the dining plan. It’s a ripoff, plain and simple, and I felt conned by the university forcing me to purchase it. I hold Uchicago accountable – I don’t think it’s an excuse that poor dining options is standard among universities.</p>
<p>I’m going to have to agree with Poplicola, here. UChicago students can be rich, spoiled crybabies sometimes.</p>
<p>UChicago’s cafeterias are actually top of their class when you consider the nearly universal low quality of school lunches in general. Of course, UChicago/Aramark can’t please everyone, but I think they do a pretty good job of trying.</p>
<p>There are good reasons why meal plans are required for on-campus students. First, UChicago can’t afford to offer a cafeteria if it doesn’t have enough students eating there; it would be losing a great amount of money (doesn’t anyone from U of C study economics anymore?). Secondly, required meal plans help solidify students’ social bonds with their housemates, which is a pretty indispensable element of the UChicago College experience. If you don’t like the above points, nobody’s stopping you from moving off-campus. </p>
<p>Part of what irks me about student complaints about school lunches is that UChicago has done a lot to increase the quality of meal plans over the last few years, to very little appreciation. When I entered the University in '07, the cafeterias were absolutely awful; in my 4th year, they had improved drastically. Of course they’re not going to be perfect, but I think the administration is doing a pretty damn good job with what they have, and I think they’re outperforming peer colleges as well.</p>
<p>UofC Parents here, ate at the South every meal each time we visited. We think the food is great. Now if you have to eat there every day, you will get tired of it no matter how hard the college is trying.</p>
<p>Here is the economics of eating on campus:</p>
<p>From the previous thread, we have established that rent for living off campus is not going to be that competitive from living on campus, whats big savings is from the food. So, lets talk about it.</p>
<p>The college charges about $1700 for each quarter and lets say its 10 weeks. To buy food on your own off campus, you will spend at least $100/week, so the difference is about $700/qtr in food or if you do it all 4 years, it is a maximum $10,000 savings. Lets face it, do the time and efforts a student spend in 4 years in food preparation(shopping, prep, cook and cleaning) worth only $10,000? You can go flip burgers in McD for 4 years part time and make way more than $10,000. Do your parents pay $250K for you to go to school and care about the $10,000 savings? Sanitary wise, do you think off campus food preparation by students would be more cleaner than ARAMARK? More over, do the parents WANT a student to spend time for food prep or do other betterment, such as STUDY or SOCIAL?</p>
<p>Think about it! Don’t be penny wise and pound foolish.</p>
<p>You’re actually telling me that if you went to a restaurant and paid the same amount of money these students are paying on average for a meal, and you got the same service as seen on those images and described in these posts you wouldn’t leave demanding a refund? And later, when you learned about the health citations of the kitchen in a back on a consistent basis you would every consider returning? Please.</p>
<p>That was certainly the way my parents rationalized it as well. I ended up doing extraordinarily well academically, got a great education, made tons of friends, and got a lot of extracurricular work done too.</p>
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<p>Exactly what I was talking about. Very disappointed in the students at my alma mater.</p>
<p>I don’t know what the health standards are like in other campuses, and I’m not going to complain about the food at the UChicago dining halls taste wise, but I for one would prefer if my dining hall wasn’t forced to flat out close down for days due to repeated health violations.</p>