The University of Rhode Island’s meal plan rates are lower than the University of Connecticut and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, according to dining services.
However, does lower price necessarily mean lower quality?
At URI, the smallest unlimited dining plan costs $2,800 a semester and the largest is $3,200 a semester, according to URI dining services. In comparison, UConn charges students $3,096 a semester for their smallest unlimited plan and $3,420 for their largest, whereas UMass Amherst charges the most at $3,526 for their smallest unlimited plan and $4,075 for their largest, according to the school’s dining services.
There is no correlation between URI’s lower dining hall prices and lower quality products, according to Pierre St-Germain, dining services director.
The few companies that URI does have longer contracts with went through a formalized bid process to ensure that URI could sustain lower pricing over a longer period of time, according to St-Germain. Dining services keeps track of favored items to ensure that the rates they receive on them are competitive.
URI’s dining differs from other major universities because it doesn’t have a marquee of nationally recognized brands, such as Chick-fil-A on campus, except for Dunkin. There are very few universities that don’t have that option for students, according to Sr-Germain.
Dining services is currently focused on renovating the Ram’s Den and Mainfare Dining Hall this summer, as well as the Rhody Market, according to St-Germain. This should not affect student’s cost of meal plans because the university is responsible for the upkeep of these spaces.
To meet student’s needs and interests, URI’s dining services provide options of various nutrient density.
“Because we’re past 12th grade, and all students are technically considered adults at URI, their dietary needs are at their discretion, not managed by the federal government in any way,” St-Germain said.
At the UConn’s Whitney Dining Hall, a dinner of outback chicken with apple smoked bacon, fully loaded and legal fries, and midnight chocolate cake with chocolate frosting for dessert would provide one with 1815.16 mg of sodium, 78.9% of the suggested daily intake, according to UConn dining services.
At URI’s Mainfare, chicken marsala, french fries and boston cream pie cake is 1,177 mg of sodium, 51% of the suggested daily intake. URI’s dinner is also lower in saturated fats, according to URI’s NetNutrition.
However, of these two meals, UConn’s dinner is higher in protein with 51.44 grams compared to URI’s 36 grams.
However, compared to UMass Amherst’s dining halls, which have been named best campus food by the Princeton Review eight consecutive times, URI’s dining lacks.
A dinner of a lemon pepper chicken thigh, sweet potato wedges, and carrot cake with donut sugar at Hampshire Dining Commons is 638.99 mg of sodium, only 27.7% of the recommended daily sodium intake, according to UMass’s interactive nutritive analysis.
However, URI’s meal has more grams of protein for students.
To help make sure that students are eating healthy, URI Health Services tries to track the sodium content of a lot of the items brought in, according to St-Germain. One instance of this is at the deli in Mainfare where meats come from a local low-sodium line called “Thin and Trim.”
Dining services try to provide a large variety of options for students to choose from, according to St-Germain. While having a larger variety of foods does impact student costs to an extent, dining services use cross-utilization to keep costs down.
“Having various offerings from different cultures and things like that, in theory, should allow students to have a similarly high level of variety without having to drive cost up,” St-Germain said.
Dining services try to ensure that the variety isn’t necessarily based on a product that is difficult to bring in, but on the different ways a common product, such as chicken, can be prepared, according to St-Germain.
Dining services get the food it distributes from a blend of distributors and local businesses, St-Germain said.
“I would love for it [distribution] to be a little bit more local, but honestly, it’s not an easy thing,” St-Germain said.
There aren’t a lot of food producers except for farmers and seafood in Rhode Island, according to St-Germain. Dining services try to bring in local seafood from Point Judith and New Bedford weekly.
They also do a lot with their own agronomy farm, URI’s gardener research center and home to URI’s teaching garden, on campus, and to lesser degrees East and Peckham farms, according to St-Germain.
“If we could have more local pride it would be great, but we have to be conscious that that does come with an increase in costs, so that’s where we have to start choosing what we believe the students find more important themselves,” St-Germain said. “What aspect of local products, if any, do the students want to see more of?”
