The “Free Food WashU” chat currently has 3,008 members and operates as a sort of civilian reporting system where WashU students can write in orders they aren’t going to pick up or leftovers from events for other students to grab. It was originally created to reduce food waste on campus but has since transformed into a service for hungry students. While the chat is part of WashU undergrad culture, we wanted to test its practicality and determine if someone could feasibly eat based on the GroupMe offerings for an entire day.
They say there’s no such thing as a free lunch, but at Washington University, there are plenty of regular opportunities to get food at no cost.
With the honeymoon period of the freshmen First 40 well in the past, it’s time to face the reality that there won’t be a WUSA or random club handing you granola bars and cookies in every alleyway. General body meetings offering free bubble tea to the first 100 attendees are long gone.
As rough as all-nighters in Whisper’s can be, a far more foul experience awaits students in graduate school. Advisors are tyrannical, the pay is miserable and lab hours are torturous. Perhaps unsurprisingly, half of those who start a doctoral program will not complete their degree.
While organizations across campus are busy trying to attract students to their events with free food, freshman Stan Rosenthal launched a Web site called nomealpoints.com to facilitate an exchange of this information. Nomealpoints.com launched on Jan. 19, the first day of spring semester, and lists all of the free food events that are happening on campus each day.
I hope you all enjoyed W.I.L.D. I hope you didn’t encounter rude staff and volunteers. I also hope you wondered why Green Action wasn’t brought in to help make the event more sustainable. And I hope that you tried to get more than one slice of pizza—and that you succeeded.
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