Dining dollars and meals

Meal plans at Bridgewater State College are divided into two different payment methods: dining dollars and meals. The East Campus Commons (ECC) and Flynn Dining Commons (FDC) accept both meals and dining dollars. At the Crimson Cafeteria (CC) and former Commuter Cafeteria (FCC), only dining dollars are able to be used.
According to Margarida Vieira, Director of Administrative Support Services, meals cannot be used at the CC and FCC because the cost of preparing food for those two cafeterias is more than that for the ECC and FDC.
Although this may be the case, the evidence that I see seems to point towards it not being the case. Dining dollars are able to be used at all cafeterias. If someone wanted to get a lunch in the FDC, he or she could either use a meal or buy one for seven dining dollars. Food can be purchased in the ECC using either a meal or dining dollars. In the CC and FCC, however, food can only be purchased using dining dollars and not meals.
If the cost of preparing food truly is different in the two types of cafeterias, making it so meals cannot be used in the CC and FCC, then the same thing would seem to apply to dining dollars at the ECC and FDC. If a student buys a lunch with dining dollars at the FDC, he or she is giving a dining dollar value to a meal; a meal could have been used, but instead dining dollars were, which means those dining dollars are acting as the functional equivalent of a meal.
If the cost of preparing food truly was so different between the two cafeterias to prevent meals from being used at the CC and FCC, then the same should apply to the use of dining dollars at the ECC and FDC. Meals are given a dining dollar value in the ECC and FDC to enable students to purchase them with dining dollars.
I see no reason why the same thing could also not apply to the CC and FCC; in other words, why meals cannot be given a dining dollar value in the CC and FCC for purposes of allowing students to use meals in those cafeterias.
On November 17, Vieira visited the SGA to answer questions related to food service. In order to better understand the policy and have the concerns I just discussed answered, I asked about the use of dining dollars and meals at the cafeterias.
According to Vieira, the current meal plans are in place from student input; she said that students "wanted to be able to eat anywhere anytime, and that's what we came up with." I asked Vieira why the use of meals at the CC and FCC is not allowed. She said that the use of meals is not allowed at those cafeterias because meal plans now have both meals and dining dollars.
Before the current meal plans were in place, a student could have a meal plan with all meals or all dining dollars; with those meal plans, students would be able to use meals at the FCC for some meals, as long as the price of the food they were getting did not go above a certain amount. Since this shows it is possible to have meal plans set up in a way that meals can be used at the FCC, I asked Vieira why such a thing is no longer in place. Vieira said that this is just currently the way it is set up.
If the reason that meal plans were changed from the old setup to the current one is that students wanted to be able to eat anywhere anytime, I would have to disagree with her assessment that the current meal plans were created with student input. Although students now have both meals and dining dollars, they are not able to eat anywhere anytime they want.
If a student predominantly eats in the FCC and or CC, he or she will run out of dining dollars much faster than he or she will run out of meals. As a result, after he or she runs out of dining dollars, he or she will be limited to only eating in the ECC or FDC.
With the old plans, students could at least eat some meals at the FDC if they had a plan with only meals, meaning they could eat in any of the cafeterias they wanted if they had anything left on their meal plans.
With the current plans, students who do not have any dining dollars left are forced to eat all meals in either the ECC or FDC, since those are the only cafeterias that will accept meals. Therefore, I do not agree with Vieira that the current meal plans actually give students more freedom on choosing where they want to eat.
I still do not see why the current meals plans do not allow meals to be used at the FCC and CC after hearing Vieira's explanation. If the cost of preparing food prevents meals from being used in those cafeterias, then the same cost of preparing food would seem to prevent dining dollars from being used in the FDC and ECC.
The fact that dining dollars can be used in those cafeterias shows to me that it is possible to assign a dining dollar value to each meal, since it is done in the FDC and ECC.
The explanations that Vieira provided to the SGA do not seem to me to justify the fact that meals cannot be used in the CC and FCC. When I asked her why the meal option that used to be used at the FCC is no longer an option, she said that it is no longer an option because the current meal plans are seen as allowing students to eat in anywhere anytime, when they are not at the end of the semester.
As a result, I do not think the cost of preparing food is what is preventing meals from being used in the FCC and CC, but it is just the fact that the people who create the meal plans do not want them to be used there.