Campus Life

Not Even Fit For a Last Meal

MIT food is a lot like Michael Bolton’s music — it’s kind of funny how bad it is at first, but after an extremely short while it gets old and eventually kills you. While part of this is due to the unavoidable nature of college food, MIT is noticeably lacking in one department: real, all-you-can-eat dining halls.

Dining halls are a shining beacon of all-that-is-kickass about the modern world: absolute, total gluttony delivered at blistering speeds. The beautiful thing about an all-you-can-eat dining hall is its versatility — one can eat nothing but salad, or realize that “Dining hall, featuring a self-serve ice cream bar” really means “all the ice cream you can eat before you puke.” The simple fact is that the decentralized nature of the available food supplies — a smattering of food trucks and small eateries dumped haphazardly across campus — turns the simple act of procuring lunch into a bizarre mixture of Where’s Waldo? and Hungry Hungry Hippos. While this is certainly exciting — after all, Hungry Hungry Hippos is awesome — it would be great if there were consistent dining halls so that students on the run wouldn’t need to recreate Paleolithic hunter-gatherer techniques on a daily basis, including the parts where you get speared by competitors for food and starve to death from lack of sustenance.

Mercifully, MIT has been kind enough to furnish its dormitories with kitchens in lieu of dining halls. What a pleasant turn of events! Now MIT students far and wide can use all of their extra free time to coo- OH WAIT, MIT KIDS HAVE LESS FREE TIME THAN A DEATH ROW INMATE IN TEXAS. Giving us kitchens is like giving Caltech kids contraceptives — at the end of the day, how often are they really going to use them? While perhaps some class in the distant future will be able to enjoy the glory that is a dining hall, it seems that for now we will only be able to eat meals consisting solely of 200 bacon slices in our dreams.