Fuck UMass, But Also Good For Them

Skip Rush7 years ago

From the Boston Globe:

When the Princeton Review eats at University of Massachusetts Amherst dining halls, it comes back for seconds. The college has topped the company’s list of the best campus dining for the second year in a row.

The Princeton Review ranks a lot of stuff on a year to year basis. They’re the Buzzfeed of higher education and not actually in any way connected with the ivy league school. Sometimes they’re bullshit, and sometimes they’re not. This one probably is not.

[…] in Amherst, chefs cooked up a supper menu Tuesday night that featured baked salmon with guava rice, barbecue beef brisket, parmesan red pepper pesto polenta, and local sautéed kale. There were also stuffed mushrooms with beans, tomato and avocado, and linguine with saffron clam sauce. Dessert? New England maple almond pudding.

My mouth dropped when I read this shit. These kids don’t know how good they have it. I quite literally would always eat in my campus dining hall if this was the kind of food I was getting.

As a person who attended multiple schools (whoops) and had some sort of meal plan for my entire time in school, I consider myself to be a pretty decent authority on dining halls and foods on college campuses. I’ve had everything from tilapia to broccoli pizza to burgers and fries. I’ve gained a lot of weight over my years and it has probably NOT been worth it considering the quality of food. These UMass kids are getting plant based protein and recipes straight from their parents.

[they asked] parents to submit family recipes which they re-create on campus. They publish a cookbook of the home recipes.

BULL. SHIT.

UMass was named the number one campus dining program for the second year in a row and it’s for one simple reason: UMass doesn’t use a giant food conglomerate to make its students’ food like the vast majority of schools around the country.

The program is run by the university, not a third-party vendor like at many colleges, and funded entirely by student boarding fees.

When a school puts time, effort and funding into a dining program, they get results. I’m shocked. My school was famous for putting assorted bullshit on to pizza, pasta, and whatever else they had left over from the previous day making a Frankenstein-esque combination of shit.

Colleges can basically charge whatever they want for the food they serve because a huge portion of the student population is basically forced to eat it. There’s no fucking excuse to not have high quality nutritional options.

Back to UMass:

Garett DiStefano, director of residential dining services auxiliary enterprises, said the dining hall has relationships with local farmers and sources up to 30 percent of its produce locally.

More shocking news. It’s really easy to locally source food when you have thousands of students to feed on a daily basis. Local farmers should be lining up at the doors of colleges to source food. This is in god damn Massachusetts, too. I didn’t even know they had farmland in Massachusetts. Anyway, good for UMass.

On Tuesday, the Hampshire Dining Commons on the UMass campus was serving chicken with kiwi relish, lemon quinoa with Craisins and thyme, local roasted sweet potatoes, and roasted eggplant with goat cheese and pine nuts. Also available: sushi, steamed mussels, house-made corn tortillas, Korean barbecue chicken, and a salad with strawberries, fennel, and oranges.

When I read this, I wanted to die. If you go to UMass, you don’t know how good you have it. Fuck my life..

[via Boston Globe]

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