Sunday November 21st

Sign above the compost bin at Stetson West dining Hall, Northeastern University

On Sunday I  spent the day wandering around Boston and exploring Northeastern University. For dinner my friend from Northeastern and I decided to save money by eating at a school dining hall. Northeastern has a bunch of eateries, but we chose to go to Stetson West. We didn't eat lunch and we were pretty hungry, so we had an early dinner. It always amazes me how environmentally friendly and organic(not to mention delicious) dining halls at other colleges are. Everywhere I went there were placards for organic, free trade, and local produce and dairy. Local food! In Boston! Why can't we have more of that in Richmond, Indiana, where we are surrounded by farms? I also discovered that a lot of the produce used in their dining halls are grown by employees of the dining halls, and that they are actually  paid more for their produce than their hourly wage. All of these factors combined with the delicious food offered at Northeastern dining halls made me very jealous indeed.

   We started out early dinner at 5:12. I had a bunch of small dishes to start and then finished off with some stir fry. I had a salad of spinach, chick peas, red peppers, tomatoes, carrot sticks, homemade croutons, and Ken's Caesar dressing. I ate my salad, and Swiss cheese with bread while I waited for my vegetable stir fry. The salad was really good and just what I needed, fresh vegetables! After being in the car for 16 hours, I hadn't eaten and vegetables and only grapes for fruit. The cheese and bread were okay, they both were a little hard, like they had been sitting out for a while. My stir fry was a little disappointing, the vegetables I chose, zucchini, carrots, sugar snap peas, and peppers were really flavorful, but the sauce I chose for my vegetables to be cooked in was a little too salty for my liking, which detracted from the dish itself unfortunately. Typically, I drink water with every meal, with the occasional supplemental glass of juice in the morning, and tonight was no exception, water it was! But in keeping with the style of their dining hall, it wasn't just water or water with lemon, but lemon infused water. We finished our huge meal by splitting vanilla frozen yogurt with crushed oreos and a cone on top. I took a fair trade banana home for a snack. We left the dining hall around 5:50 to catch the 6:30 show of Harry Potter, which we walked to of course!