As a concerned student, whenever I receive e-mails about how I can make Iowa State University a better place, I go out of my way to press the “delete” key hard enough (you learn about this as a computer engineer) to generate signals causing the sender’s computer to explode.

But when I received an e-mail offering twenty-five “Dining Dollar$” to be part of a focus group to discuss “the university’s preparation for its master dining plan for the entire campus,” I immediately accepted.

I felt I should take the responsible step of moving beyond just whining about Dining Services to being compensated by it.

Unfortunately, the focus group was run by a very nice lady named Mary or Helen from an outside consulting agency. She was very good at directing the discussion towards how and where Dining Services should expand and increase its services while avoiding focusing on the real issue of how the cafeterias’ ravioli is fit to chalk sidewalks with.

Now, I’m not some finicky prude who can only stand to eat off a menu where each entr‚e has at least five of those French accent marks in its name.

I’ve eaten terrible food ever since I joined wrestling in high school and competed in the weight-cutting event.

Between periods of not eating, I would eat food generally reserved for cows or for the crazies who wouldn’t eat cows in an attempt to trick myself into thinking that eating was as enjoyable as tetanus shots.

The absolute worst thing I tried to eat was a “tofu dog,” which is a tube of tofu that has almost as much taste as if you took rubber and packaged it in used hot dog wrappers that had some leftover hot dog drippings. I didn’t know what was more disturbing: the taste, or that it made me really long for the taste of blended pork eyelids and snouts in a cellulose casing.

In any case, I haven’t eaten anything that bad at Dining Services, although I think this is because at many dinners, I stick with eating the foods I can trust, which mostly come from cereal boxes or individual ketchup packets.

So I brought this issue up with ISU’s new director of Dining Services, Jon Lewis.

I didn’t think he’d have much to say about it because I figured anyone with a college degree and a paying job would need to eat cafeteria food as often as most movie stars need to shoplift.

To my surprise, though, Lewis says he eats at Dining Services every day. Not only that, he says, in a sincere and enthusiastic tone of voice reserved for football pep rallies, the food is “great.”

His favorite meal is the biscuits and gravy (his least is the limited salad bar).

Now, since he has been in food service administration for longer than I have lived, we should be inclined to give him some benefit of the doubt that maybe people exaggerate about the lack of quality in our Dining Services.

Or take comfort that 26 years of eating cafeteria food makes you go insane in the happy, everything-is-great-including-the-pink-rubber-walls-in-my-room kind of way.

But really, according to Lewis, there will be a lot of improvements and changes to Dining Services over the next couple of years and I believe he will get the job done, and not just because he has the power to arrange for a bacteria colony the size of Finland to inhabit my next sandwich.

These plans include the merger this January of Dining Services and the Memorial Union food services, allowing students to stand in line in the food court until May in order to purchase Big Macs with their Dining Dollar$.

Also, there should be a marketplace/caf‚ located somewhere on north campus, such as Lagomarcino Hall, by next fall. Dining plans will be allocated by the week instead of by the day so that students who skip meals won’t be paying for it. And Lewis says he wants Dining Services to eventually have a good bagel line, legitimate Mexican food, and even sushi.

So although there are already some exotic entr‚es on the menu like “barbeque soy/bun” or “meat, green,” I can’t wait until these new options come along.

Until then, I’ll patiently and loyally eat the food that has been good at helping keep my weight down.

Dan Nguyen

is a senior in computer

engineering and journalism

and mass communication from Iowa City.