The problem with Cornell meal plans

Meal swipes are as wasted as me on a Friday night Freshman year.

A.k.a. the most wasted.

Sometimes you just can’t make it to the dining hall in time, you’re sick or you go to Collegetown for dinner instead. And of course there’s the end-of-year scramble when you feel like Gatsby buying all your friends food at Nasties because you have 200 BRBs that are about to expire.

But there are students who can barely pay their tuition, let alone a meal plan, who could put those unused swipes to use.

Our community has rallied around Jonah, a student who cannot afford to stay at the University, with a successful gofundme page.

But what about the rest of the students struggling to get by, studying for their exams while hungry because they can’t purchase balanced meals? Why turn a blind eye to them?

Swipes, as it is appropriately called, is a location-based app created at Columbia University that allows users on campus to share meals swipes. The Columbia community has responded very positively to it.

“If you’re already at the dining hall, and your phone asks you to share, it won’t bother you to give. Specially if you those meals were going to expire anyway,” said co-founder and CEO Julio Henriquez.

So how can we get something similar to Swipes at Cornell, knowing that the community is charitable enough to let it work?  For starters, we would have to change Cornell’s BRB policies if we wanted to go the BRB route.

A quick Google search into this plan shuts down some hope almost immediately.

BRBs [are] tax exempt student debit plans also known as Meal Plan Points. These plans can only be used for food. They can not be used for guests and must be used by the end of the academic year.

It is important to note that Cornell does allow guest swipes for meals. However, these swipes are fairly limited per semester and vary by meal plan. A system that would allow people to give out their guest swipes could work, but not on the scale that Swipes has had at Columbia.

Given that many students do not end up using their swipes per week and many college students are food insecure,  Cornell needs a system in place such that these swipes can be used by people who need them, similar to a pay-it-forward type system.

It may cost Cornell some profit, but that profit is negligible compared to the impact it would have on students’ experiences. Columbia allows students to use regular, non-guest meal swipes to bring others in and thus Swipes can work. Should Cornell allow the same?  What do you think they should do?

In the meantime, there is a student-run charitable organization  that does something similar. Cornell Students for Hunger Relief encourages students to use their excess BRBs to purchase necessities and non-perishables, such as bread, canned food items and cereals, so that they  can donate to the poorest families in Ithaca and Tompkins county.

These aren’t meal swipes, but it is always important to give when you can.