Comment by leetcrew | Hacker News Reader

Comment by leetcrew | Hacker News Reader

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> Cooking hundreds (or sometimes thousands) of good meals on a budget is a challenge that few kitchens seem to master.

the part that confuses me here is the "on a budget part". i attended two very different schools for undergrad, but the meal plan pricing and food quality was very similar. when divided by the total number of swipes, meal plans at both schools cost about $11-13 per meal. the food was not inedible, but it was far worse than an $11 meal would be pretty much anywhere else. both schools offered a la carte cafes run or chains that would take cash and charge about half that for a filling meal that was much tastier (and was able to accommodate pretty much any allergy or dietary restriction).

the universities will always say something like it costs extra to be make enough food to feed everyone without knowing who will dine there on a given day, but don't all restaurants face that problem to an extent? is there some genuine reason why it has to be so expensive/bad, or are they all just taking advantage of the mandatory freshman meal plan to subsidize other parts of operation?

The extra cost may be due to labor if the university is unionized.

The college cafeteria has to deal with, at least, the intention or pretense of making something nutritious, but also that people will actually eat. K-12 school lunch programs face this problem too: Kids won't eat healthy food.

But yes, even when I was in college 30 years ago, some students figured out that paying cash at the cafeteria was cheaper than the meal plan, and they raised a stink about it.

Making nutritious food that tastes good on a budget just requires compromise. Fatty meats are cheap and tasty, but they're not great for you. Legumes are cheap and healthy, but most people don't find them very exciting. If you use both, you get something better.

America seems to have gone all in on the the "lean meat" route, which results in many meals which are barely cheap and not good. Of course, my culinary opinion is based on my personal taste preferences. But I mean, like, burritos.

> America seems to have gone all in on the the "lean meat" route

I'm constantly complaining to my family that meat here (in the US... more precisely, the Bay Area) isn't tough enough. They tell me I'm weird, and meat in the US is soft because that's how Americans like it.

(Lest the phrasing confuse people, all of us are Americans.)

Meal plan at my school (Canada, about a decade ago) was 2800$ Canadian for 19 meals a week, for two semesters (checking, it is now about 3600$CAD). Worked out to somewhere in the range of 4 or 5 dollars a meal - what a bagel and a coffee would cost at a cheap chain place.

That being said, I think you did point out something interesting - the pricing and food quality doesnt vary much between different schools in similar situations (markets/locations). In what I've seen, this is because most of these are run by the same big corporate chains - Sodexo or similar.

Don't students in the North America cook at all? In university I used to eat a subsidized lunch, and take care of my breakfast and dinner myself.

Depends - many students live in students residence for their first year in university, and cooking isn't an option there (anything besides a microwave/kettle is not allowed). But most students move to private apartments later, and do most/all of their own cooking.

Interesting, our student residences had fully equipped kitchens. Just larger ones if there were more people sharing the same space.

Some are like that, but most do not have kitchenettes (in my experience!)

meal plans at both schools cost about $11-13 per meal

I knew the chef at a previous employer, he used to like to make bets with people, “I bet you can’t eat £1 worth of food”.

He always won because at catering rates an egg was 2p and a rasher of bacon 1p. The money goes on labour and facilities, the cost of the actual food is a rounding error.

I'm referring specifically to my experiences in southern Germany, by the way.

If memory serves, $11 dollars is roughly twice what a single meal is allowed to cost at a German university cafeteria. This is considerably cheaper than a typical restaurant meal.

Competition or lack thereof

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