Meal Plan: good idea or clever ruse to get your money?

This is the third of a (now) five part series regarding everything an incoming freshman might need to know about their first year in college. While there are some examples that will be UF-centric, most freshman can ascertain what they need to apply specifically to their school. I will try, regardless, to bring in examples from as many schools as I can. Also, I’m just going to keep trucking along with the overall series while I wait for interviews to occur .

The Meal Plan.

It seems ludicrous but simple. Your parents basically buy this behemoth called the meal plan which assures that you won’t go hungry for the semester. The meal plan, at most universities, seems like a paradise. All the food you want, plate after plate, with no nagging voice behind you saying to stop eating too much or to eat your veggies.

Let’s take a look at your garden-variety meal plan from the only example I bother quoting, UF (actually I did look at UCF’s and they’re pretty much the same)

• 5-Open Access: Unlimited meals from M-F, $300 Flex Bucks (cash you can use for fast food eateries)
• 7-Open Access: Unlimited meals all week, $150 Flex Bucks.
• A block of meals (usually 150), and some certain amount of flex bucks.

Prices don’t really matter…my point isn’t to focus so much on the actual price of the meal plans as much as the value is/how the meals actually taste/etc.

(For all intents and purposes, we’ll assume most meal plans are the same across the country. Obviously look at your specific school’s Dining Services website to see what plans they offer)

So I started out and ended freshman year with a 150-block plan. I thought it’d be a good idea because honestly I wasn’t a big breakfast person at all. My breakfasts consisted simply of a mini-cereal box thingie at most, and nothing at the minimum, with a banana and orange juice being in between. Lunch? Occasionally I’d pick up maybe something at a fast-food joint but I gravitated toward making my own sandwiches rather than even going to the dining halls. It was dinner that left a gaping hole…and dinner would be best served by a dining hall…no matter how gross it was going to be.

Now this especially applies to UF…although I wouldn’t be surprised at all if this happened anywhere else…on the first day of UF’s orientation you get to dine at one of the dining places (Broward or Gator Corner…yes there’s only two). Now I don’t know if they put crack or something else in it, but orientation food is damn good. And rightfully so…they want to put on a good show. But they also want to put on a good show because they want you to believe that these meals will be lavish EVERY day.

Reality check: they sometimes are. But most of the time not.

Some of the meals are genuinely good…but you wonder how they made them. There’ll be days when they’ll be serving steak fajitas one day and then some crap fish the next. UF’s dining halls are nice because there are about six different stations serving something completely different from one another…so it’s rare that you won’t find something to actually gorge on.

Granted, the portion size is somewhat small…but that is a good thing, trust me. You also won’t find yourself facing a lack of veggies because they’ll find some way to sneak them into you some how. But don’t refuse to eat them…eat them. You know you don’t want to, but at the same time you know you should.

However, at least at UF, you find the food to be redundant. You definitely find yourself saying at least twice in a semester “Haven’t I had this before?”. Also, you start to notice that there’s some kind of generic ingredient that they put into ALL THE FOOD that makes it somewhat palatable…and then you realize that the only kind of panacea ingredient possible is MSG and you start to feel sick of it halfway through your first semester. (I’m not saying that they actually do put MSG…but it’s a thought).

So what’s my verdict? Try the meal plan out for the first semester…it, after all, is just like housing: you need to be in a dorm for your first year. Likewise, for the experience, you need to have a semester of subpar food. But after that, if you figure you can’t deal with monotony anymore, cancel the first week you get back from your winter break (any longer and you really can’t cancel anymore…at least at UF).