The search for "free" food

There once was a time when, if you were a resident student at a college or university, you had to purchase a meal plan. More often than not, it was a standard, 19-meal-per-week program, and it led to a fair amount of complaining about missed meals, and women subsidizing the men due to the relative amounts of food consumed by each gender.

Over time, board plans became more flexible to take such issues into account, and some foodservice programs even adopted pay-as-you-go programs, with students using declining balance plans to pay only for what they took off the line.

Now, could a clever Web site created by an ingenious computer science graduate stir cries for a return to the standard meal plan? From my hometown newspaper comes a story about a Carnegie Mellon University graduate, Greg Woloschyn, who has developed “Food-bot,” a Web site that searches for and reports on locations where hungry students can score free food on their campuses.

According to the article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the site currently is in use at CMU, Stanford, Duke and the University of California at Berkeley. The Web site is designed to search for online notices of campus events where food may be served. When the site discovers what might be such an event, it sends an email to Woloschyn. If the event is legitimate, Woloschyn adds the event to the site, and an email is sent to all subscribers to Food-bot.

The site even rates events on a scale of 1 to 10, based on the quality and quantity of food and how difficult it might be to get into the event.

For his efforts, Woloschyn recently received CMU’s Smiley Award for technology innovation. Appropriately, the reception at which the graduate received his award was listed on Food-bot, because food was served.

I don’t know if any university would have enough such events to sustain enough students to endanger the finances of the Dining Service department, but it is an intriguing thought. I wonder if Eric Montell, Shawn LePean and Jim Wulforst are losing any sleep over this.