Are you hungry, Comets? Is there a rumbling in your tumbly that can only be satisfied by a nourishing meal? Do you, a fledgling baby bird, look to the sanctified momma bird of your alma mater UTD for some precious sustenance, knowing you are too weak (broke) to find some yourself?
Well, go fuck yourself. This school, unfortunately, hates you and wants you to die, particularly if you live in the dorms. See, incoming freshmen living in University Commons are required to purchase a Meal Plan. For the uninitiated, a Meal Plan entitles you to a certain number of swipes into the Dining Hall either per week or per semester, depending on how much money you spend. If the Dining Hall isn’t your preference, certain restaurants on campus will accept a meal swipe for one of a few predetermined menu options and either a fountain drink or a bottle of water. That is specifically a Meal Exchange, and students get one per day, excluding Saturdays and Sundays. It’s one of the few programs that hasn’t risen in price in the last few years – even decreasing slightly when adjusting for inflation. By all means, this should be a great program. Except this university and the company it works with to provide food to students SUCK, and are doing their damnedest to make the Meal Exchange program worse and less valuable in every conceivable way.
The Meal Exchange program is my enemy. See, I admittedly have a bone to pick. As a Houston transplant living on campus, I as a junior have had a Meal Plan since I got here. I spent the bulk of my (unemployed) sophomore year living off Meal Exchanges and the rare visit to the Dining Hall, and even now that I have a stable job I still use them every now and then if I feel like I’ve gone a little nuts with the spending lately, which is why I am uniquely qualified to tell any freshmen using their Meal Plans that you are being catastrophically ripped off. Corners within the Meal Exchange program have been cut in every possible way. The shiny new Buffalo Wild Wings? Used to be an on-campus bar called the Pub which had a Meal Exchange option. The boba place? Used to be a Smoothie King that also had a Meal Exchange option. In just two years, we have gone from eight options to six, and it feels like it’s only a matter of time until the others continue to dwindle.
It’s not just less options for food, though – it’s less food, period. Halal Shack now makes you choose between lettuce and spinach, because having two different kinds of leaves in your rice bowl is simply too bourgeoisie. Taco Bell’s offerings have downgraded from combos and craving boxes to individual items with the beneficence to include a side of cinnamon twists – which are more air than snack. Getting any substantial amount of food out of the Meal Exchange is like pulling teeth. None of these, however, are the greatest sin of the program. That belongs to one of their newest changes. You can no longer get a bottle of water with your meal, excepting just the Market and Papa John’s. I shouldn’t have to explain how enraging this is – but I will! This is my article and I get to make the rules. The tap water on campus is disgusting. It tastes like metal, glue, and sadness. It tastes like a class action lawsuit in 10 years. Having access to clean, filtered water is a luxury for those living on campus – it is a rare apartment in UV or Canyon Creek that doesn’t have at least one Brita. The only options for bottled water outside of a vending machine being Papa John’s at the butt-fuck edge of campus or the Market with its tiny proportions of actual food feels like a cop-out at best and a punishment at worst – why would this University minimize ways to access something as basic as clean water?
Because they’re in league with a company that may or may not be the literal devil.
Most students have seen the name Chartwells on campus. Chartwells is the company UTD purchases food from, who negotiates Meal Exchanges with franchises and caters almost every event on campus. Googling ‘chartwells’ takes you through four search pages of their various branches and websites. Googling ‘chartwells lawsuit’ gives you four different lawsuits on page one, both related to Chartwells and its parent company Compass Group. To hit the highlights, Chartwells/Compass Group have: sent rotting meat to DC public schools, fed horse meat to unwitting children in Ireland, exposed prisoners in Ontario to listeria, been involved in a multi-billion dollar UN corruption scandal, and had dozens of labor related complaints ranging from discrimination to retaliating against employees for requesting medical leave for work-related injuries.
Even on our campus, UTD and Chartwells are exploiting students – most meal locations hire exclusively international students whose visas only allow them to work on campus. If they get fired, they could lose more than their jobs – they could lose their visas. This practice means that these student workers employed by a company known for retaliation cannot speak up if they are mistreated for fear of losing everything. On every level, Chartwells is disgusting, and UTD pays them millions of dollars of our tuition money to continue being disgusting, knowing damn well the harm Chartwells and Compass Group have caused around the globe. I wish it were as simple as them not knowing, but as the reduction of the Meal Exchanges on campus shows, UTD just doesn’t care. They don’t care about the bi-monthly raw meat incidents. They don’t care about their workers. They don’t care what they feed us as long as we keep paying them for the pleasure.
Again, I ask: are you hungry, Comets? Are you hungry for food, or are you hungry for more? The material effect of these limitations, of working with these horrendous people, is this: the Dining Hall is simply unsafe to eat at, the Meal Exchange options get smaller and sparser, and the students on campus have to spend more money – on snacks, on Tobor deliveries, and on the more filling, non-Exchange options on campus. These problems aren’t going to be fixed because they’re not a bug, they’re a feature designed to milk more out of you. That “more” goes to Chartwells, and to shiny new buildings that the university can point at to draw more students and their money in while those of us who are already here get less and less. It is unacceptable, and it cannot continue. The future may demand different, but the students must demand better.
