MMMM I LOVE SLOP!!!!!

Those who have been at Columbia for a while will have noticed a certain trend in Columbia Dining. Johnny’s. Fac Shack. Mobile ordering at Chef Mike’s. The occasional time when John Jay has paper bowls. One student, Hillary Lee, put it simply: “I would give my firstborn to Johnny’s if they asked.” What do all these changes have in common? While yummy, what do we lose with this format of dining?

In the past few years, in reaction to Columbia expanding enrollment, Dining has been forced to expand options. A consistent complaint, as reported by Columbia Spectator, is a frustrating lack of seating. From 2021 to 2023, Columbia Dining opened 5 new dining halls, bringing the student to seat ratio from 9:1 to 6:1. This is progress, but our ratio is still notably higher than Columbia’s peer institutions, as Yale, Harvard, and UPenn each have a 2:1 ratio. The only other Ivy with a higher ratio is Dartmouth, and theirs is still lower at 4:1.

Faced with that gap, Dining’s solution hasn’t been to build more seating. It has been to make seating less of a priority. Enter the food truck. The grab-and-go window. The corporate slop bowl. 

The slop bowl has come to be a defining moment in food for the 21st century. Think Chipotle. Then all that came after. Sweetgreen. Cava. Dig. Think grain plus sauce plus toppings. Logistically, the slop bowl is perfection. It travels easily, requires less skilled labor to produce at a major scale, and keeps costs down. When designing food around the assumption that students won’t be eating it at a designated seat, slop from Johnny’s and Fac Shack is the solution. 

Grab-and-go dining is a helpful solution in some ways, and the food is genuinely good there, but it shapes more than the menu. It molds student behavior on a campus many already describe as lacking community. When the food comes in a packaged bowl, and there’s nowhere to sit, you just take it back to your room. “I think it leads people to be asocial chuds”, commented Valerie Yang, CC’27. “Especially in the cold months, realistically, you just get your bowl and go back to your room by yourself”. 

This raises an important question of what a dining hall is actually for. If the answer is just calories and convenience, then opening Johnny’s and Fac Shack is an efficient solution. This is why the slop bowl is a favorite in the corporate world. 

Dining halls, however, have traditionally been something else. They’re a place for students to come together after class and catch up. It’s somewhere to linger and come together while taking a break from work. For many students, especially underclassmen with larger meal plans and no kitchens, it’s one of the main spaces for campus life to actually happen. 

It’s understandable why Columbia Dining would utilize this model. Enrollment pressure is not only real but increasing, space is limited (especially in NYC), and budgets do matter. However, we should consider how the slop bowl approach shapes student life, and ask what a campus designed for student interaction could look like.

Header via Bwog Archives