Opinion
 

Chartwells leaves students hungry

By Richard Lutz

Complaining about food is a great college tradition, but after Spring Break, my gripe is the opposite: lack of food. During the break, Chartwells closed most of their food outlets on campus. The C Stores and Smoothie Kings in the Campus Recreation and Wellness Center and University Center were open, but the store and cafeteria in the Quadrangle and everything but the grill in the Towers were closed all week, from Friday evening to Sunday morning. Everything open was on reduced hours. That's eight days of living in a virtually foodless dorm.

I was told once that about 90 percent of students at the University of Houston commute. But because UH is a large school, the other 10 percent makes up a couple thousand students, and even during the break hundreds of these remained on campus. 

Add to this a number of visitors, and we have an argument in favor of leaving the cafeteria open in the dorms.

Yes, I was born with legs. Yes, I am capable of looking at a clock and walking across campus to buy food while the store is open. But the store in the Rec Center, which I visited several times, is sadly lacking in such staples as bread, peanut butter, cereal and canned goods. These "real food" items have been known to make shy, brief appearances in the dorm C Stores, but not during the break. Did they expect us to live on snack foods for eight days? 

The root of this problem is the root of all evil -- not money, but the unreasonable pursuit of money. Chartwells runs Food Services on campus, but they seem to have forgotten that the phrase is composed of "food" and "service," neither of which are consistently provided. The stores closed, I believe, because they didn't want to spend money to serve a mere several hundred students. We are fed cheap garbage, junk food and preservatives because they want to minimize the monetary impact of uneaten food. Fresh fruits and vegetables go bad quickly, so we don't see many of those. Quality food, like something not soaked in grease, raises costs as well. But decency dictates that to serve food on a campus, you need to put service ahead of maximizing your profit. If you want exclusive rights to my food budget, my health and comfort must be your top priority. If you can't do that without financial ruin, then you don't deserve the contract.

The ghost of Adam Smith stands beside me now: "Why don't market forces solve your problem?" he asks. 

In a capitalist society, Chartwells should crumble quickly as students flock to grocery stores and other low-grease food sources that always have bread on the shelf. But this campus is not capitalist. We have a crazy communist economy in which, included in our housing contract, another contract gives Chartwells at least $780 of our money each semester. Students put up with a lot of, shall we call it, stuff, but we shouldn't have to eat it as well. We are, as they say, ready for some real food.

Lutz, a columnist for The Daily Cougar, 
can be reached at drahcir_j@hotmail.com.