Six Dining Hall Meals No One Eats

So I'm giving a young friend of mine a tour of Cornell later today. Right now, I'm in my Creative Writing class analyzing poetry with my hipster teacher, who has the exact same beard as every other graduate student in the English department. I'm thinking about three major sales points for Cornell: great academics, wonderful diversity, and excellent food. The all-you-can-eat sushi bar is a major component of that (I live for sushi).

But no matter how good the dining hall food is, there's some things that no one ever eats.

Any Ice Cream Flavor Beyond Mint Chocolate Chip, Cookies and Cream, Chocolate, 

and Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough

It's not that difficult, people.

The ice cream freezers in Cornell dining halls have room for four flavors. Listed above are the only four flavors which anyone ever eats. The obvious conclusion is to put those four flavors in every ice cream freezer. I'm not sure if they've got a weird contract with the distributor, or if there's some weird kid over in Dickson who eats absolutely nothing but lemon sorbet, but the dining staff insists on stocking the freezers with flavors nobody likes. 

My English teacher just admitted the poem we were analyzing was probably meaningless, and continued analyzing it anyway. 

No one eats that purple sludge they call raspberry ice cream. Or the white sticky stuff they pretend is Italian ice. Or the strawberry that has frozen bits of what are supposed to be fruit and are actually just big chips of ice. They just sit there for days and days, until someone (maybe the mice) finishes them off. Drop in a tub of the flavors everyone likes, and it'll vanish in a nanosecond. 

I was out to dinner with a group of six people once, and the only ice cream flavor left was raspberry  Only one of us got any, and she took one taste before throwing it out. There is no greater waste than raspberry ice cream

Soup

This is one of those foods that's great for spilling on yourself and not much else. The main campus dining hall, Oakenshields (named after that dwarf from The Hobbit, probably due to an alumni with a weird sense of humor), has a soup station in the middle of the room that never sees a line, and in other dining halls, the soup containers are tucked so far into the corners that most people don't even know they're there.

This is because soup isn't a food. It's not really a beverage, either. It's some weird hybrid of both. When people think about what they want for dinner, they never think of soup. Seriously. They have this cream of broccoli stuff that's heavier than your average textbook and this sweet and sour stuff that is filled with unidentifiable particles. The clam chowder may or may not have actual clam in it, and the french onion has neither cheese, bread, or actual onions.

My hipster English teacher doesn't know he's got one strand of hair sticking up straight out of the back of his head. He's like a freaking backwards unicorn.

Vegetable Sushi

This stuff tends to contain carrots, and we all know how much I hate carrots. But that's not the real reason no one ever eats it. Sushi is for fish. It's supposed to be exotic. It's not just a wad of rice and carrots.

Now wrap it in rice. Yay. 

Also, they always serve California rolls on the worst possible nights. I hate California rolls; they taste exactly like soy sauce. Maybe that's because I put too much soy sauce on them. Some nights they have tuna rolls or shrimp or even horseradish--the girl next to me just asked if D'Artagnan was a character on a TV show. Seriously?--but they never have the good ones on the nights I'm actually there. 

Vegetarian sushi is a horrible invention. Sushi implies fish, preferably raw. Making sushi without fish is like making a sandwich with only two slices of bread.  

Stir-Fried Bok Choy

This dish lives at the Asian station. It is suspiciously shiny. Never trust food that looks like the hood of a BMW in a car commercial. Also, they put scrambled eggs in it, and sometimes the eggs are only runny blobs that look suspiciously like saliva. It smells like salt, possibly because salt is the only ingredient, possibly because the only way to make bok choy edible is to drench it in salt. In fact, I think I hate bok choy worse than carrots. At least carrots have an interesting color. 

Sometimes they put meat in the stir fry. They favor seafood, which is why you'll occasionally see tiny octopus tentacles sticking out of the green, shiny strands, covered in dripping bits of runny eggs. This is not appetizing. I don't even think it's legal. I see the chefs mixing up bowls of stir-fry the size of a Mini Cooper, throwing tentacles and bok choy and eggs into the air, and all I can think it, I used to like Asian food.

The 'Fresh' Fruit

Cornell is big on locally grown fruit. But sometimes, they can go overboard. I'm pretty sure the oranges were grown in New York, because they're tiny, tasteless, and covered with little black spots. Also, they're quite flammable. 

If the blond girl in the Alpha Phi v-neck turns to the left, she'll give half the class a peek at her nipple. Seriously, wear a camisole!

Every banana in the fruit bin is covered with spots--though they make excellent props if your roommates are reenacting Charlie's Angels and pretending to shoot each other in the hallway. All the apples are bruised and some have been chewed on by bugs. And those are the only three pieces of fruit you always see, unless you count that bucket of pathetic honeydew melon slices that no body likes but for some reason appears in every fruit salad.

Does real honeydew melon ever look this appetizing. No. No, it does not. I'm expecting there's some kind of melon growers conspiracy going on. They're keeping all the pretty melons somewhere else and selling the gooey green cubes. 

The Gluten Free Corner

There's a big sign in the corner of one of my dining halls that says 'Gluten Free', but there's never any actual food there. Cornell's the second most vegan friendly college in the country, we have a kosher station in the--geez, Alpha Phi girl just used the word 'like' eighteen times!--Appel dining hall, and we have soy milk in every freezer--and now the shy premed girl is talking about her yeast infection!--but the gluten free section is as empty as the stomachs of every man, woman, or child on campus with a gluten allergy.

I really don't understand what they have against gluten free food. According to Taylor, it's only about 1% of the population who's allergic to gluten, but we mark our vegan dishes, and veganism's a (really weird) choice. The gluten free zone's more abandoned than the old observatory, which is probably haunted.

And my hipster professor wants to know why I'm staring at my screen so intently. I could tell him that's because he knows absolutely nothing about good writing, but I'm relying on him to give me an easy A, so I guess I better start paying attention.