During the tenure of the new cafeteria that came into existence with the building of the commons, there’s been a lot of experimentation of different kinds of lunch options for students. While I haven’t been a frequenter of the cafeteria food over the past 3 years, I have occasionally found myself buying one of the Fusion bowls. The Fusion bowls consist of some form of chicken (orange, sesame, etc.) and either noodles or rice/fried rice. At a price of $6.75 for a pretty large tray of chicken, for a while it was considered one of the best options in the cafeteria. It was affordable, good quality, and filling. Not to mention it sometimes came with an eggroll and a fortune cookie, it couldn’t get much better than that. 

However, I’ve recently noticed that the size of the bowls has drastically decreased. It went from a medium sized tray to a pretty miniscule bowl. I originally thought that with the size decrease, there would be a price decrease, but I was mistaken. The price remained at $6.75, which seemed unreasonable to me. The bowl was now almost snack size, and was not sufficient enough to account for a full lunch for someone who was only looking for one item. The buyer would now have to buy some supplementary snacks in order to not be hungry during the last two classes of the day following lunch.

I am not outraged about this change, but am just curious as to what the reasoning behind it is. Perhaps it’s a temporary change, due to a supply shortage or something of that nature. I also know that St. Ed’s does not control the pricing of the food in the cafeteria, so they are not to blame for this change. Perhaps there is no clear reason, and the food company just happened to change bowls without giving much thought to it. Only time will tell what the implications are of the change in size of the beloved Fusion bowl.