The Missing Ingredient In John Jay

As most college students know, the joys of dining hall eating are few and far between, and most of us would rather just have a nice home-cooked meal. However, eating in a dining hall is part of living on a college campus. There are many different ways to have fun, but sadly, at Columbia University, few of them involve the food.

You know what I’m talking about—crusty plates, fatty meat, poor lighting, and a general lack of “deliciousness” that is unacceptable for an establishment whose meals are nearing fifteen bucks a pop. But I won’t act like I was expecting great things. I would often talk to Columbia students who I had known beforehand about different aspects of the experience that they liked or disliked. Some students I talked to would evade my questions about the cuisine by emphasizing “the great intellectual conversations,” while others would bluntly state, “The food sucks, you should try to eat most of your meals at Barnard.” Not exactly an auspicious start for John Jay and I, but I still looked at the new experience with optimism.

To make a long story short, I eventually took the advice of the second group of students.

In light of the recent 32 health code violations which have been dorm gossip since almost the beginning of the semester, there has been a change in the way students—especially first-years—look at John Jay. It was never cool to like John Jay, but it was certainly bearable for first-years in general. I have seen collective feelings go from apathy or mild dislike to disgust and abhorrence. This has been reflected in John Jay’s traffic, which seems to be in a steady decline. However, even with an anti-John Jay sentiment running rampant across the campus, little has been done to reverse the negativity. Columbia is failing to properly accommodate its students, and if Alumni Affairs expects to be able to hit me up for donations when I’m older and successful (cross my fingers), then I want to be able to look back fondly on all aspects of my everyday life here. And it sure would be nice if I didn’t have to trek all the way from my room in Hartley to Hewitt just to enjoy an acceptable meal, so allow me to make a few suggestions:

My first idea is to introduce new fixtures in the main hall. John Jay Dining Hall has often been described to me as dark and drab, which reflects the nature of a building that is about 100 years old. However, I find that ambience is an important part of enjoying a meal. The light fixtures could be replaced with something newer and more modern to brighten up the place and to create a more suitable environment for eating.
The second suggestion is that students should bus their own dishes. If there were trash or compost receptacles available for students to scrape off their own plates, the employees inside of the washroom would be able to spend more time making sure that there was no caked on food on the plates, meaning cleaner plates for all involved (remember, campus employees eat at John Jay too). Also, I’m not quite sure how that giant dishwasher contraption works, but the school might want to invest in a better system because the plates on which its students eat should always be as clean as possible.

Now for my final suggestion, I call for a John Jay overhaul—one which concerns the way staff interacts with students. You see, one of the pluses of John Jay is the omelets at breakfast, and I think a big part of it is the one-on-one interaction the students get with Ms. Wilma. She makes our food right before our eyes and serves it to us, and we get to express our gratitude every day. Very few of the other employees get to have that opportunity, an opportunity which I believe they wholeheartedly deserve. So I propose that instead of having the self-service stations we have become so accustomed to, John Jay should become more “Hewitt-esque.” Employees would make and serve food in front of the students, and there would be a lot more friendly interaction instead of having a cook periodically come to scrape a new batch of mac and cheese onto the old one or to wipe off the salad counter without any interaction whatsoever. I honestly think that if this were to happen, the quality of the food and the experience of eating at John Jay would both become much more acceptable to students.

I realize that implementing these suggestions, particularly the last, would require substantial funding, re-budgeting, evaluation and planning on the part of University, but I also believe that the students’ health and happiness should be first and foremost on the minds of all University administrators and that a change that will ensure its effect on posterity is clearly worth the investment.

The author is a Columbia College first-year.