In theory, Brandeis could cover the extra money (and may be covering part of it already, I’m not sure) rather than tacking it on to the meal plans, but that would involve cheaper meal plans at the cost of higher tuition, and would also charge more money for people living off campus, who aren’t benefitting as much from the added convenience of on campus dining.

That said, the extreme lack of flexibility is extremely annoying. The point of meals from Aramark’s standpoint is to insure that we’re buying food made here, which is the most profitable for them. Why not just make the other food more expensive, or raise the fee and make the more profitable food cheaper? Currently their policy highly selects against having breakfast each morning, which has been scientifically shown time and time again to be the healthiest time to eat. Aramark’s shift to more equal lunch and meals is good, since it’s equally feasible (and in many countries, the norm) to eat a larger lunch than dinner.

The hours also annoy me. Arramark has no financial incentive to run at hours that non-on campus students won’t be here (i.e. weekends and holidays), but as long as we’re paying extra to compensate for this fact, they should provide the versatility we’re paying for. My biggest complaint is Einstein’s not being open Sunday morning, since Einstein’s is primarily breakfast food anyway.

That doesn’t change that I agree that meal plans are a rip off, but in exchange for paying so much, we are able to get food on campus from 7am to 2am on most weekdays. Is it really profitable for Aramark to keep the CStore and Einstein’s open until 2am five days a week? Probably not.

I could crunch the numbers for Usdan, but ultimately I’m trying to give Aramark/the Administration the benefit of the doubt.

So, we have this idea that our predecessors in the 60s were pretty politically active, and now there is some disillusionment (reasoned or otherwise). And in between these two times we have the change from a Brandeis-run food service (replete with locally-grown food and [here, I'm extending] the accessibility of those that make decisions regarding the food consumed) to the faceless, distant, un-accessible, corporate, for-profit food service that we have today.

We graze between Tier 2 A, B, and C or Corporate Fast Food™ at least 3 times a day without a sense of participation, ownership, or community in the process by which those choices were presented. Perhaps this does not account for the change between eras, but I doubt that the current experience of dining lends itself to student-empowerment.