I feel this is a comment on the whole system right here. You work with food. Food is pretty much the most important thing, society falls apart without it. Winter weather is looming. Campus is closing for safety reasons. And yet. And fucking yet. When it comes to the food they’re like “fuck it, we’ll just play it by ear and let the cookstaff take the risk.” Of all the things they should maybe devote half an hour of planning to. “Is there gonna be food for the kids tomorrow.” Kinda important. Maybe actually more important than the classes.

Disasters always expose what we truly prioritize and deprioritize

It would also be great if colleges didn’t cripple students ability to cook shit with banning appliances like instant pots and selling overpriced rooms with overpriced meal plans and no kitchens

Some college kids can’t make Easy Mac in a microwave. Dorms with microwaves are constantly having fire alarms go off because they forgot to add water, so idk if I’d trust them with that lol.

Jokes aside, I think young adults should be taught how to cook and clean up after themselves, but in this case, having dining hall staff whip up a bunch of burritos and sandwiches and distribute them to dorm residents would be the best choice instead of endangering food service workers’ lives.

just out of curiosity, is/how much of campus dining services are privatized/outsourced to like sodexo or aramark?

i worked on a campus for a decade after being a student there and saw changes to power dynamics as a result of dining service privatization, because suddenly there was a corporate “partner” with its own motivations completely external to the values (re: safety) of the campus community. and that partner wants its cut of the action.

all of it happened behind closed doors of course, because the privatization was deeply unpopular with everyone not on the board of trustees. the trustees themselves needed the corporate partner to leverage for access to credit to upgrade a shitload of buildings on campus, mostly campus housing… so dining services was a sacrifice pawn in the larger game and came with a lot of little sweeteners to smooth over relationships, including creating paid advocates out of adversaries.

but the changeover happened before covid and absolutely played a fucked up role in the premature “back to normalling” of forcing of people back to campus to drive business to all the little non-cafeteria eateries the private services had launched. so it really wasn’t about getting food to those on campus during a pandemic, but was really about pulling more bodies back to campus to drive foot traffic to those places.

the neoliberal managerial university is such a fucked up machine.

Amazing that they can’t make a plan, like distribute easily reheatable food to the dorms ahead of time. Or even distribute microwave shit like you said.

Jeez, when I was in rehab they’d just leave sandwiches in the fridge for us when the cook staff had left for the day, can’t do that?

Ability to afford food is increasingly a class discrepancy. The richer students will all have mini-fridges and microwaves and cars to drive to the grocery store with. Poorer students, especially ones on scholarships, would be left behind without the dining halls. I would pack food out of the dining hall in tupperwares all the time, but by the end of my time in the dorms they were cracking down on that, and I can’t imagine having a supply that would last me more than 2 days. Idk if you’re on an urban campus, but without the dining halls, suburban and rural campuses would be food deserts.

None of this is to say that you should be obligated to commute in. They have the ability to put you up in an empty dorm room for a few days, AND pay you overtime on top of that, without breaking the books.

On-campus housing is one of the clearest examples of the financialization of higher education. Also it’s yet another illustration of how the logistics of where we live are ridiculous.

should just let the students in the kitchen whats the worst that could happen

like several fatalities but lets roll those dice

I was taking a class and at a laboratory where all the students stayed in a dorm on site. One day when there was snow in the forecast, the cook pulled me aside, showed me where everything was in the fridge, and was like “you can handle a stove, right?” Nobody died (we also made some soft pretzels). Sure, harder to scale on a college campus but kids just need to be able to work an oven without blowing themselves up in order to be allowed out of the house.