Trinity residents deserve a real dining hall

Despite paying $2,284 for a meal plan, almost 600 on-campus UVM students struggle with good nutrition daily. 

Living on Trinity with a small, super artistic and fun-loving community is fun, though there are aspects of this campus that provide a burden.

Trinity campus is often overlooked due to its distance from the rest of campus. 

Trinity is home to eight different residence halls, fitting a capacity of 591 residents, according to UVM’s Residential Life website.

The long walk from Trinity to anywhere else on campus, especially in cold wind, rain and snow, is a major inconvenience, but having Northside Dining on Trinity made everything easier.

Until this semester. 

This year, to my utter dismay, Northside is no longer a regular dining hall but, a “Grab-and-Go” model due to short staffing, according to a Sept. 17 Cynic article. 

The food at Northside now is equivalent to what you would find at a 7-Eleven: chip bags, sugary snacks, bottled drinks and frozen dinners that you microwave yourself in three provided microwaves for everyone eating there.

Though UVM  Sodexo’s Northside Dining webpage stated it offers re-heatable entrees, yogurts, fruit, sandwiches, salads, snacks, coffee and beverages.

While UVM Dining found a solution to understaffing through only needing a couple of people working Northside, they left an entire campus of students at UVM hungry and disappointed without a proper dining hall. 

The lack of warm or fresh food makes eating a filling and nutritious meal at Northside very difficult. 

Also, the limit of five items for a meal plan swipe and one meal swipe per dining period just adds to this difficulty.  

Northside Dining previously had homey warm food and a kind dining hall staff that put care and commitment into meals. It was convenient and a nice space to hang out with friends. 

While other options are available for food, the walk to the nearest dining hall from Trinity is 15 minutes away, which doesn’t make it easy to eat if you need a quick bite or when the weather is gross. 

This change is so upsetting for me and my friends on Trinity. 

We already feel like the school and housing plan doesn’t offer us fully what we are paying for, because of how seedy the dorms are and how far away everything is. 

UVM as a university with lots of money should do better than try to fix short staffing by lowering the quality of food for students on Trinity campus.

 Northside Dining needs to be fixed this semester.