Senior government and politics major
Something troubling struck me during the power outage Tuesday. Provost Mary Ann Rankin’s campuswide email to the university community during the blackout assured students that Dining Services would remain open in a limited capacity from 4 to 7 p.m. during the outage and convenience stores would offer nonperishable items.
The problem is this: I don’t know that North Campus students should be so reliant on Dining Services that in the event of an outage, they have to live on the food available at the 24 Shop and the Snack ‘n Shop, aka the Inconvenience Store. I don’t even think a person could live on convenience store food under normal circumstances.
Is there really that little food available besides what this campus provides?
The answer is yes. This university has created a food desert on North Campus.
The Denton Community can get salad and vegan options at the North Campus Dining Hall, and when that closes they can get apples and bananas at 24 Shop. Should this campus face another emergency in which the buses aren’t even running, students living in Oakland Hall would have to walk all the way across campus to Route 1 to find food. But until the Whole Foods Market or TargetExpress open, the only food available there that isn’t made-to-order has to be bought at CVS, unless people feel like walking to Hyattsville.
It’s almost as though, instead of cramming in a special express version of a department and grocery store under an apartment building, there were a huge expanse of wasted open space west of the campus where we could fit a full-size store, a parking lot — and an entire mall, if we were feeling cheeky. It’s as though there is a huge expanse of land that’s steps away from the largest cluster of student housing on the campus.
Or, I mean, we could just build a farm there. The golf course has been so nice to clear the land for us already, I think they want us to get started.
Emma Atlas is a senior government and politics major. She can be reached at eatlastdbk@gmail.com.
