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TURITEA DINING HALL FOOD IS CRAPOLA
OPINION: Sarah Harris says competition on campus would encourage the serving of edible food.
THE MASSEY UNIVERSITY TURITEA CAMPUS
Dining Hall is a place where students and
staff gather to eat, study, and catch up with
friends, especially during the common break on
Wednesdays from 12pm till 2pm when no one
has anywhere else to be and good luck getting a
free computer at the library.
The Dining Hall predominantly serves the
purpose of feeding the first years living in the
halls, their bright young faces lining up each night
at 5pm to get dinner and excitedly chattering
about the news of the day, who’s sleeping with
who in their hall, who they think has a good
chance of getting into vet (sadly, statistically
most of them won’t, but they don’t need to know
that yet), and so on.
They tuck into plates full of food served up by
staff, who look thoroughly bored, from great vats
full of mass-produced food, the surface of which
is usually dry and crusted from the bright heat
lights above it.
Students get the following on their meal plan:
one main (from a choice of about five or six,
usually including two vegetarian options), salad,
and dessert. Doesn’t sound so bad, right? That’s
what parents across the country think when they
sign their darlings up for the hall of their choice
and the meal plan that goes with it.
The meal plan has to at least include dinner if
you live in one of the main halls situated directly
on campus (Colombo, McHardy, Walter Dyer,
Moginie, Craiglockhart, Bindaloe, Miro, Matai,
Tawa, Totara) which are the halls that suit the
demographic of most of the first years students
at Massey.
HERE’S A TYPICAL MENU FOR A FIRST YEAR
STUDENT AT DINNER:
SALAD: This is generally pasta salad, garden
salad, and roast vegetable salad. It was always a
bit of a mystery to us how they managed to make
all three of these salads taste identical.
Main: Fatty meat cuts, burgers with slimy lettuce
and dry crusted tops, and weird green sludge
labelled “curry”.
DESSERT: If I ever see another “Golden” pudding
again I’ll scream.
OTHER: Fridays are always fat boy Friday, with
chips, fish in batter, burgers – just stuff that
made your arteries clog just by looking at it.
I remember in my first year, some of the people
in my hall (Colombo) and I sat down and calculated
how much we were paying for each dinner
we had at the Dining Hall. We calculated that it
was approximately $11 (by subtracting the rent
amount from the total we pay, then dividing by
seven to work out the cost of each meal, if only on
the dinner plan).
We then worked out what we could make for
ourselves paying that much per meal. We could
easily make healthy, nutritious food for ourselves
at a fraction of the cost. Good theory, but we
couldn’t, because the Halls Community Group
didn’t allow self catering in the convenient
on-campus Halls, and still don’t.
It’s not only first years who have found themselves
dissatisfied with over-priced, under-whelming
food. Because the Dining Hall is one of the only
places to eat on the Turitea campus, students are
faced with little option if they don’t have time to
make their own food to bring with them. Many
students study and work, and time to put into
making food daily is something many lack.
At most other universities, students have many
great options for purchasing food. Waikato has
nine different options, while Auckland has 15
cafes and many more shops that sell food items.
This issue was raised recently at the VC Forum,
where students asked Steve Maharey to comment
on the low-quality food served at the Dining Hall.
He acknowledged that something needed to be
done about it.
So what is the solution?
One idea is to stop the monopoly that the Dining
Hall holds over the campus. Other universities
have opened up to businesses opening
on campus (such as Auckland having a New
Zealand Natural on campus) which promotes
more options. This would be especially good for
Massey because we are on the edge of Palmerston
North and away from town.
Perhaps some competition would encourage the
Dining Hall to stop serving rubbish and start
serving edible food.
STARTUP WEEKEND WINNERS ASK ‘WHAT’S 4 LUNCH?’
A mobile app that gets children helping with
food preparation has taken out first prize at
Startup Weekend Palmerston North. This was
the first Startup Weekend event held outside a
major city centre in New Zealand.
The weekend-long, hands-on experience gave
aspiring entrepreneurs the chance to find out if
their startup ideas were viable. In just 54 hours,
the winning team developed a website and
mobile phone app to get kids interested in the
food they eat.
Called What’s 4 Lunch, the app provides
recipes with information about each of the
ingredients, including its origin, along with video
and photos. The What’s 4 Lunch team won an
$8000 prize package for their efforts.
Second place and the Open Data Prize was
won by Friendsafe, an app that enables
people to share their travel plans and improve
personal safety. As well as sharing the start
and end-point of a journey with friends, the app
also operates as a communication platform and
emergency feedback alert that records audio,
video, and geo-location data. The Open Data
Prize, worth $1000, was awarded for using local
open data sources.
Little Helper Books received an honourable
mention for their concept, which allows parents
to create games, apps, and ebooks in which
their child is a character to help them deal with
difficult situations.
Startup Weekend Palmerston North was
managed by the BCC, a Palmerston North
based business that specialises in taking
technology ideas to market. The weekend was
sponsored and hosted at UCOL Palmerston
North, with Massey University and Kiwi Landing
Pad being the other major sponsors.
“I was blown away by the quality of what was
achieved over the weekend – it was at the same
level as what we've seen come out of Auckland
and Wellington,” said Dave Moskovitz, Startup
Weekend’s global facilitator. “What really
stood out and made all the difference was the
teamwork. Teamwork trumps naked skill, and
too much ego in a fast-moving high-pressure
situation is a recipe for failure.”
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