It’s Thursday at 1:15. You are reading daze over lunch at your favorite lunchtime spot: the Terrace restaurant in the Statler. You order yourself the new specialty — make your own salad. You wait on the line for 15 minutes behind some girl who feels the need to flip her hair into your mouth every two minutes and who changes her mind about which salad dressing she wants (there are only three) five times. Since this is your first time, (ooh you’re a salad virgin), and you figure you should have protein at lunchtime, you add the chicken to your salad at no extra cost. So you dig in for your first big bite. “Yum this dressing is delicious! I love these tiny tomatoes.” You decide to be a bit more adventurous in your next bite and cut yourself a piece of chicken that you delicately place on your fork and into your mouth. “Oh my goodness” you think. “I just ate worm.” You spit it out and it lands on the friend sitting next to you. After grabbing it off his face you look at it. No, it wasn’t a worm. You have just had your first taste of the shady chicken at Cornell University.
This scene is a reality. It happens in dining halls all over campus everyday. This so-called “shady chicken” can be found anywhere that a salad can. In Trillium, or even the Big Red Barn, when buying a salad with chicken you will always receive the same white and gray speckled piece of “meat” in the shape of a chicken cutlet. I have done extensive research on this topic. In fact, I love the salad at the Statler. Since I feel bad depriving myself of protein I often head to the grill to pick up one of those freshly grilled pieces of chicken. Now, one would think that this would solve the problem. And it does — if you want to spend $10.10 on lunch. You see, instead of just exchanging the chicken, they charge you as if you are having an entire chicken sandwich, yet I see no roll, no cheese, and no special sauce. I know there’s a lot you could do with $10.10, but I don’t have time to go into that now, this is a weekly column.
But the problems with Cornell’s dining facilities don’t stop at chicken. Trillium used to be a place where a student could get a nice turkey sandwich. Unfortunately those times are over. Now Trillium features what they call “Cascadeli Breads”. If I wanted a Cascadeli sandwich I would have gone there. When eating these sandwiches on the bread the size of a small child, I often get the feeling that the sandwich is eating me. Weird. Because of this development, I have observed many students going toward the sushi. The sushi isn’t bad per say, but no longer can you watch the sushi being created. And I get nervous when the package that says “tuna” houses a gray-colored fish.
As a person who would love to eat a large chocolate chip cookie each day for the rest of my life, I understand why every single “food stand” sells them. Yet as a person who would be 750 pounds if I ate one of these enormous cookies everyday, I do not understand why low fat options are never offered. Uris library at 2 a.m. is often dubbed a “club”. At the club, snacks are a necessity, but the surrounding caf