steak night.
Freshman year of university. The only year I was living in the on-campus dorms, which were different than living in the on-campus apartments, because you were required to have a meal plan.
The logic behind it made sense. In the apartments there were full kitchens, so it was plausible that students were cooking their own food. But in the dorms, they didn’t want students to starve to death, and even if parents just gave their kids a bunch of money to go buy food, very little of it would probably be put to that purpose. 99% of it would probably go to booze or illicit substances, with the remaining 1% spent on impulse-buy munchies at 7-11.
But in truth, the meal plans themselves were huge scams designed to line the pockets of Sodexo, our school’s food service contractor that ran basically everything that served food on campus. They were extremely expensive, if I recall correctly the cheapest plan was way north of another thousand dollars added to the already expensive dorm rental fees.
They were also designed so that they weren’t really that good of a value. Like, okay, if you spent $1000 upfront but could eat every meal every day on campus for free, maybe it would work out. But there were always weird rules, like you could only eat a certain amount of times per day, or only at certain places, or things like that.
The one my mom got me was pretty decent, I could eat two meals a day at the dorm cafeteria, I think all seven days a week. But it didn’t stack, so I couldn’t eat one meal on Monday there and then eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner on Tuesday. So if I ever chose to eat out elsewhere, that was a “lost” meal that I paid for but didn’t receive. I also didn’t get any allowances at any other of the Sodexo food vendors, it was the cafeteria or nothing.
The cafeteria wasn’t terrible, it’s been the topic of a few posts already here. After subsisting on it for a year, though, I can happily say I never wanted to eat there again. The food was also really greasy and bad for you, almost surely responsible for untold numbers of Freshman 15s every semester.
It was buffet style, and they had different stations, a pizza station, a grill station, a pasta section, et cetera. I think I wrote about this before in the vegetarian dinner entry.
Anyway, there was one shitty night. Thursday night. Steak night. For some reason, on Thursdays the cafeteria would forego its typical food for steak night. My first week at school, a few people told me about it excitedly.
“Oh man, just wait until Thursday. It’s STEAK NIGHT! If you eat at the cafeteria one night a week using your meal plan, make it steak night!”
These kids that told me this didn’t seem to be alone, either. Thursday night was the one night a week where it was pretty much a given that you’d be waiting in a line out the door to get in for dinner service. Sometimes, it was a really long line where you’d have to wait upwards of half an hour.
But I’m going to let you in on a little secret: steak night fucking sucked. After you waited in the long line, you were given a ticket for your entree. The cafeteria was usually all you can eat, but I guess steak is too expensive for that, so you were only allowed to get one serving.
Now, I’m not a huge steak fanatic, but it was pretty much in the same class as the other low-grade shit that Sodexo served every other meal of the day. I can’t honestly imagine that this steak cost much at all, since it had the texture and appearance of an abused tire. And it wasn’t just a bad cut of meat, it was also tiny as hell, I guess again due to cost issues. You got about three bites of meat, along with a potato, I think.
You did have an alternative to go for a chicken breast, and after a while I ultimately just began opting for that every week as the year wore on. Chicken’s chicken, it was nothing spectacular but at least it wasn’t a colossal disappointment like the steak was.
To make it even lamer, when it was steak night, the steak/chicken distribution took up one of the other stations, I think it was usually the grill (burger/fries/sandwich/chicken nuggets) station, which was typically my favorite station, so you not only had to eat your one little serving of crappy steak (or chicken), but you couldn’t get the other stuff that was at least decent.
I never understood why students would get so amped up about steak night, nor why Sodexo even bothered at all.
Fuck steak night.
