Many times in the past few weeks, I have heard someone come back from dinner and exclaim, "Frary has such better food than Frank," or "Scripps has the best food." In my experience at Pomona, the dining halls have virtually the same food.

I’m convinced that these claims are nothing more than a case of the grass being greener on the other side of the fence, and the occasional getting lucky and getting an above average meal at some other dining hall. In my experience, I usually get a bad night somewhere else while at the same time missing one of the better dinners at Frank.

The most shocking revelation is that Frank’s food really isn’t bad at all. Okay, yes, I like to complain about it, but that’s more because sometimes it is just asking to be made fun of. Some days, granted, it’s depressing to stand in line for ten minutes only to find oneself in front of a plate of three kinds of mush that look and taste about the same. Other days, however, one or two of the entrees are actually quite good, perhaps even as good as something one might expect from an off-campus restaurant.

The biggest problem has got to be the monotony. Half the time, everything on my plate is the same color. It seems as if the kitchen has eight or so vegan entrees (and, from my casual observation, eight to ten meat entrees) and rotates them throughout the week. Even the "different" dishes end up being quite similar. I mean, really, is there a difference between Cantonese Stir Fry and Tofu Stir Fry with Broccoli? If there is, I have never succeeded in noticing it.

Okay, yes, I tend to take more note of the monotony in the vegan items, but I’ve never seen any of my meat- and dairy-eating friends refer to the wondrous variety of options. The vast majority of the items served in the dining halls look, taste, and quite often are the same.

The only other major problem with the dining halls are the occasional day when there really is basically nothing worth eating. These meals occur once a week or so, and really are quite sad, but truthfully, they’re at least balanced out by the meals during which there are more tasty dishes than can be eaten in one meal.

The repetition and blandness are really the major reasons why other dining halls seem so much better. I remember last year, while eating at Frank with a bunch of friends from Scripps, I heard them rave about how much better our food was. Of course, many of my friends here think Scripps is so much better that it’s worth a fifteen-minute walk every other day. What they neglect to notice is that Scripps, along with basically every other dining hall on the five campuses, has essentially the same food as Frank, but with different colored dishes.

Personally, I love variety and would get a kick out of eating dinner somewhere different every night, but we eat at the dining hall closest to us the vast majority of a time for good reasons. Although I’d like to say that the reason is that I have better things to do, in reality, the reason is quite the opposite; I’m too lazy. Usually an hour before and after dinner is spent sitting around my room doing nothing. The benefit of gathering friends and walking ten or fifteen minutes (or even twenty if I’m deluded enough to go to Harvey Mudd for dinner, which I’m not) is just not enough to make up for the convenience of walking five minutes and eating dinner with all my friends.

The most important thing about our food is the fact that it really is so much better than the dining hall food at the vast majority of colleges and universities; that comes as an added bonus, because we really didn’t come here for the food. I mean, if we wanted to eat really good food, we would save the 34,000 dollars a year and instead spend it on eating out at expensive restaurants.