St. Thomas marketplaces should provide a small selection of cooking staples to supplement and maximize meal plans and support students who don’t have one.
Most campus meal plans come with a hefty dining dollar amount, but the only options to spend it on are junk food. Students can only spend dining dollars at T’s, Scooters, The Loft, Stacks Cafe, Steam Cafe, Corner Market or Summit Marketplace; which means their options are mostly premade meals such frozen pasta and microwavable ramen, restaurant to-go meals and generally unhealthy snacks and drinks.
Sophomore Emma Gearns said that she feels “terrible” about how unhealthy these options are.
“When I want to snack, I don’t want to go there,” Gearns said.
While I love my tea and coffee runs at the cafes and being able to stock up on snacks from the marketplaces, I would rather spend my “money” on ingredients for meals, including fresh produce.
Duncan MacNeil, who works in dining services as the manager of retail operations, has tried offering fruits and vegetables.
“Historically, the iterations I have attempted have resulted in us tossing out more than 90% of the fresh items,” MacNeil wrote in an email to The Crest.
MacNeil presented another problem in providing a wider variety of fresh food. After speaking with current vendors, MacNeil wrote he “would be unable to provide more personal quantities of staples while keeping them competitively affordable.”
Spending already-paid-for dining dollars on expensive food would still be less expensive than spending additional money at grocery stores, and it would prevent dining dollars from going to waste.
At the end of last semester, I had $61.63 out of $500 dining dollars left, about to expire, and spent all of it on whatever snacks were still in stock at the Corner Market. I actually ate about $30 worth of them.
It would make the most sense for the marketplaces to provide shelf-stable, common ingredients that most students are likely to buy so their money doesn’t go to waste.
Gearns said she would like to see shelf-stable ingredients.
“Very basic items like potatoes, onions, garlic, carrots…basic vegetables that will last on their own,” Gearns said.
With the importance of shelf-stable foods in mind, I would want to see eggs, butter, flour, sugar, olive oil, rice, pasta and pasta sauce, as well as the fresh produce Gearns mentioned.
“Knowing that I will likely have an excess of dining dollars at the end of the year, and even if not, I would rather be spending it on, like, fresher vegetables or things that I can cook,” Gearns said.
Providing a small selection of such items would also ease students’ stress when it comes to finding time or having the ability to grocery shop. As someone who lives on campus and without a car, there aren’t many nearby grocery stores I can rely on.
Gearns, who lives on campus with a car, describes how having access to quick, healthy snacks would make her busy day easier. Even in the afternoon when she doesn’t have classes, Gearns needs to work instead of going shopping.
Gearns said it would be nice to rely on St. Thomas for a quick, healthy snack when “maybe I don’t have time to grocery shop.”
While no student should be dependent on Summit Marketplace for meals, a little help from it while in a pinch would mean not going hungry or eating bags of chips to get through the day.
Even with the hurdles to providing cooking staples and fresh produce at Summit Marketplace, focusing on shelf-stable and common foods would mean less money spent at grocery stores, less wasted dining dollars and happier students.
In a grocery store, providing only shelf-stable ingredients would be depressing. On campus, providing these basics means showing the student body that student health preferences and financial stability are important when it comes to providing food for students in addition to a meal plan.
Leila Montoya can be reached at mont1761@stthomas.edu.
