Geneseo requires first and second-year students to purchase specific meal plans. People with eating disorders and ailments may struggle with this excessive access to food and buffet-style dining (such as the one pictured above) (Tudokin/wikimedia).
For freshmen and sophomore students living on campus, using a meal plan is an everyday reality. To most, this swipe-and-go approach is convenient and eases the transition into living independently. But, for a much smaller population, dining dollars can be burdensome. For these few, purchasing a meal plan should be optional; the reasons are multifold.
For those living with binge eating disorder, having a meal plan can be an emotional weight that’s hard to bear. First-year students specifically face a difficult transition as they adjust to college life—making friends, heavy coursework and separation from the comfort of home are all challenges to navigate. When the world is crumbling down, food gives people a sense of solace. I’ve come to know this truth firsthand, and I think many others can find it commonplace.
Sometimes, with little explanation or induced by stress, people with binge eating disorder feel an unwavering urge to eat … everything. Amid an episode, people have tunnel vision and food is the only thought swirling around their minds. Imagine having that feeling and then being surrounded by tempting snacks and all-you-can-eat dinners on campus. There’s an abundance of food just one swipe away. Meal plans can be toxic, and only increase the eating disorder struggles people already grapple with.
Moving from mental conditions into physical ones, meal plans pose a challenge to people with severe dietary restrictions. CAS does a good job of accommodating most students’ needs, but for some, they fall short. One Geneseo student suffers from Hashimoto’s disease—an autoimmune disorder that slowly destroys the thyroid. For her, gluten and animal-based products prompt inflammation, so she finds it best to avoid them.
At Geneseo, this student feels frustrated by “how limited the vegetable options are and how small serving sizes can be” and struggles to meet her caloric intake. She believes she would “fare better doing [her] own shopping instead of being bound to a meal plan.”
For students who struggle financially, paying more than $2,000 for meals at the beginning of each semester is hard, especially when that expense is coupled with room, tuition and other fees. Although financial aid like the excelsior scholarship can ease the burden of paying for tuition, it doesn’t always extend to meal plans.
To put the cost of the meal plan into perspective, bear with me as I do some number-crunching. If a student were to penny-pinch, a weekly grocery budget of $40 could be feasible. Using that baseline, the cost for a semester’s worth of groceries (16 weeks) is $640. When comparing grocery expenses to Geneseo’s Gold meal plan ($2,528), students save around $1,878 per semester and $7,512 over the span of four. With such significant savings, someone could pay for more than a whole year’s worth of tuition: $7,070. That’s quite a feat—especially for students who struggle to fare, needing to work long hours at a minimum wage job for survival.
Meal plans make some students’ experiences at Geneseo much more difficult, yet they are inescapable. I’m someone who would prefer not to have a plan, but when I asked CAS if I could opt out it was to no avail—no doctor’s note or personal plea could exempt me. This makes little sense. If something hurts students—mentally, physically or financially, why would a college ever endorse that?