By: Victor Dixon, A&E Editor
As a campus resident, I often hear my fellow students complaining about the food served in the Mabee Dining Center, whether it be the texture, flavor, overall quality or type of food being served.
But I’m here to tell you that you should reconsider your negative opinions.
I was a USD 259 kid my whole life and attended elementary, middle, and high school all right here in Wichita. So I grew up with public school food as a daily part of my life. By comparison, this campus’s food situation is absolute heaven for me.
On a typical day, the dining center offers a pretty good variety of main dishes, from fried chicken to pasta dishes to grilled cheese sandwiches, along with a plethora of side dishes like breadsticks or vegetables or potatoes in countless different forms. The center keeps reasonable enough hours that ensure you should have the opportunity to eat a reasonable number of times each day.
Mabee also has cute little desserts and ice cream and a great selection of drinks you can enjoy alongside your meals. It has themed days sometimes, too, like tacos on Tuesdays or the occasional Asian food day, or a spread of birthday treats on one day per month to celebrate anyone having a birthday that month.
Not into that? That’s fine: The salad bar is always open, and during lunch the caf even has burgers and other grilled foods available that you can top to your liking.
Sometimes there’s even soup. I don’t know about you, but for me, being able to sit down in a school cafeteria and have soup is a jarring but welcome adjustment from what I was used to.
Not to mention breakfast. You can hardly go wrong with any dish at breakfast. Plus there’s a cereal bar and a waffle maker that you can use to your heart’s content.
Not only are all of those options at your disposal, but you can go through the line to get more food multiple times at no extra cost. I mean, come on: Even if the food isn’t the best thing you’ve ever eaten every single time, I think it’s a fair trade for never having to walk away hungry or having spent an unreasonable amount of money, which is an experience that I and just about anyone who grew up in public school can sorely relate to, especially those of us who grew up in underprivileged communities.
I’m not saying you have to love it or that it has to be your favorite place to eat in the whole world, but I am saying that it definitely wouldn’t hurt to be openly grateful, especially because there are worse options and because there are people there who are working hard to keep you properly fed.
PHOTO: Courtesy photo: Unsplash
