Weblog
One of my favorite campus eateries here at Cornell is the Ivy Room, but only because I live dependently on two of their dishes: the popcorn chicken pasta bake and the dijon burger. On the whole, I don’t think the food offered in Willard Straight Hall is really why Cornell has such a pronounced reputation in university dining, but then again, it’s far from deplorable. I’ve had food at Carnegie Mellon, and well… LOL.
Ivy room serves French fries in ready-made batches, kept under heat lamps in those little paper bowls you get with your hot dogs at beachside concession stands. As I was waiting for my dijon burger today, I looked on as a shorter-than-average white guy dressed in nondescript jeans and standard winter attire picked up two such bowls of fries, redistributed as many fries as he could from one bowl into the other, and walked away with the more plentiful of the two, leaving the now near-empty bowl behind, devalued and unwanted.
Ivy Room is not an all-you-can-eat dining hall. You pay for each item that you bring to the cashier (I’ve regrettably seen people forego this requirement on occasion), and so the price you pay for any item is supposed to reflect its value at the time it is offered to the patron. Informally, this condition is no different than what you’d expect at any other retail store. You don’t go to REI, take a backpack off the shelf, fill it with a bunch of hiking equipment, and then go to the cash register at the front pretending to buy the backpack and nothing else. Not unless you’re stupid.
Or an asshole.
The guy at Ivy Room knew that I saw him commit the offense; he looked up at me just as he started to walk away with his prize fries, and for a split second, an ounce of guilt manifested itself in the sudden awkwardness of his mannerisms as a he quickly averted his gaze. I don’t think I had it in me to make my contempt outwardly apparent to a perfect stranger, so I didn’t voice any protest or otherwise give any indication of my disappointment, but I kind of wish I had.
That whole affair made me pretty sad.