Stephanie's Perspective of Being Off The Meal Plan

My friend Stephanie has been on the Wheaton meal plan every year until this year. She's a Senior now and she's happy to be off the meal plan. Being off the meal plan does not mean that she's happy about everything in being off the meal plan. There were hoops that she had to jump through just to get off the meal plan. It is not by any means an easy process to get off the meal plan as you can see in the hyperlink above.

Stephanie and I had a conversation broken up into parts. The questions were how do you feel being off the meal plan? What are the pros? Cons? What issues have you had being off the meal plan? And finally, what is one good thing about the Wheaton meal plan/dining services?

Stephanie told me that she had a feeling that the dining hall food was making her sick and that turned out to be true as she had to get a doctors note to even get off the meal plan. In the long term, she feels much better physically. 

Her pros: it is much less expensive, she is not sick anymore, and can make whatever food she craves. She does not have to walk to chase, and cooking is much less time consuming than she thought it would be (takes as long to cook a meal as it did to take a trip to chase).

Her cons: she does not get to eat with friends as often (food creates a social experience and not being able to eat with others can be boring and lonely), she has to do the dishes, and the kitchen is pretty dirty usually. Sometimes she does not have time to go food shopping, and has had issues keeping the vegetables she purchases fresh in her fridge because the fridge freezes things in certain parts of the freezer no matter how high or low she sets it. 

One good thing about dining services: "it makes you take a break from schoolwork to be social during meal times". "If it weren't for the fact that the food makes me physically ill, going to a dining hall is probably better for a student's mental health".

As we can see, eating with others obviously makes a huge difference in the meal experience even if the food is not the best for that individual.