Keith Mader
Coming to college is a leap into adulthood when students leave their parents and venture out to make choices and to control their lives for the first time.
We are trusted with cleaning up after ourselves, doing our own laundry and deciding when we want to go to bed. The idea is that we are completely independent, but is that idea real or only an illusion? The truth is that all Linfield freshmen do not have as much freedom as excepted. We are still required to spend money on meal plans, whether we’d like to or not.
As 18-year-olds, we are legally allowed to rent an apartment and sign up for the military. We have been given the option of independence in the real world, yet the college insists on imposing limits to our freedom.
What is the point of the meal plan? To provide prepared food for everyone who is hungry and lives on campus. It is a logical option for students to guarantee them three meals every day. It makes sense for a lot of students, but it isn’t the best option for some.
At the beginning of the year, my girlfriend was under a strict, gluten-free diet because of some medical issues she had. These, coupled with her religious dietary restrictions, limited her from eating everything in the cafeteria except for salad on multiple occasions. The gluten-free station, which was not set up until months after the beginning of the year, was pitiful. The only options were cereal and bread — not things that most people would like to eat for every meal.
Even students who have food allergies have trouble getting off the meal plan. I have a friend who has a lactose allergy. She had a lot of trouble finding anything to eat in Dillin without dairy. When she tried to get off the meal plan, she was met with adversity. Even after much argument and struggle with the food services department, she still was required to be on the food plan, but was allowed a smaller plan.
In addition, there are many students who do not enjoy the menu options that campus dining services has to offer for all meals. On many occasions, I have seen friends sipping on water at dinner. I asked them why they weren’t eating. They replied that Dillin didn’t have anything that interested them that night. Many students would prefer using the money they are spending on meal plans for food that they would enjoy.
“The meal plan is in place to ensure that students eat,” Jason Briles, Linfield retail and catering manager, said. “There isn’t sufficient food storage area in each dorm. It would be difficult for all the students in the dorms to cook in the dorm kitchen.”
The question is why can’t students have the option to be off of the meal plan? What if someone wanted to eat out every night, why couldn’t they have the option to spend their money on that? The school should remove its meal plan restrictions and make them more an option than a requirement.