Annoyance of the Day

For those of you who don't know, Monday began the start of (surprisingly) one of my favorite holidays, passover.


Passover is the story of Moses and the Jews and their struggle to get out of Egypt.  Basically, Moses wanted the Jews freed, Pharaoh didn't, so G-d hit him with some plagues, parted a sea and bing bang boom we were out of there.  Simple enough, right? Right.


So during passover Jews are not allowed to eat wheat, yeast, legumes, soy, rice (for some of us) and corn.   Unfortunately those foods are contained in everything.  For example I had a salad for lunch today and tried to get Italian dressing but it had soybean oil.  Then i tried to get fat free Italian but that had high fructose corn syrup.  So what did I do? Eat my salad dry. Gross.


So by now you're probably wondering what that has to do with the title of this entry, annoyance of the day, well I guess it's incorrectly labeled since it's more along the lines of annoyance of the passover. There's only about 8% of this University's population that's Jewish. It might seem like a small number but that's approximately 3000 people! Which is also approximately the size of the Greek community we have all come to love (hopefully).  Well during passover there are these great food restrictions and what does the university do to accommodate those 3000 students? NOTHING.  Even the new north commons gluten-free section is a step in the right direction (im sure the individuals with celiacs disease really appreciate it) but how difficult would it be to make a kosher for passover section in at least one dining area on such a large campus?  I understand that obviously not all 3000 jews keep passover or even eat from the dining halls but does that mean there shouldn't be some foods that we're allowed to eat during passover offered to us from the meal plan we're paying thousands of dollars for a year? I think so.  It forces the ones of us who do keep passover to spend extra money elsewhere and let's be frank, no one wants that.


Yes I understand dining services is making HUGE changes in the years to come, most likely to be implemented when we switch over to semesters and hopefully that's something they're considering.  Who knows? I sure don't.