Food Options at ONU

This last week I made the realization that I still have over 200 Polar Points to spend at dining options here at Ohio Northern University before we leave for the summer. Polar Points can only be spent at the McIntosh Dining Hall, Cosi at Northern, WOW Café American Grill and Wingery and Polar Espresso or The Northern Lights Café. Unfortunately, these Polar Points do not roll over from semester to semester so if you do not spend them, you lose them. While it may seem like there are plenty of options to spend these points on, there is only a limited amount of food I can eat here that doesn’t send my stomach into a whirlwind. Right away I have eliminated the McIntosh Dining Hall from my options and I haven’t eaten there since my freshman year. The food really isn’t that bad, but when you eat it every day for an entire school year it gets old really fast. Many students at ONU have even come up with the phrase “Mac Attack” which means exactly what it sounds like. If you eat at the Mac, the food may end up attacking your stomach in the near future.

I am not much of a coffee person, especially at the prices sold at Polar Espresso or Northern Café, so it is very rare that I stop at either of these places. I have nothing against them, I just can’t justify spending $5 to $6 on a cup of coffee. I used to love going to WOW because it offered different options than what was available at the McIntosh Dining Hall and they also have a convenient store where I can load up on junk food and bottled drinks. After a while, the food at WOW began turning on me much like the food at McIntosh and before I knew it I could no longer eat the food at WOW without making a trip to the bathroom very soon after eating the food. I think the main problem my body has with the food at WOW is the amount of grease used to cook the various fried items sold. I haven’t completely cut WOW out of my routine because I still love to head to the convenient store and get armfuls of late-night snacks and bottled pop.

This leaves me Cosi at Northern. Before this year I never really ate at Cosi, but man was I

missing out. The food served at Cosi is comparable to the food you can get at Panera and it appears that food is a much healthier alternative to the food available at WOW or the McIntosh Dining Hall. Cosi has built their restaurant around their flatbread oven, in which they bake fresh flatbread all day, every day. My favorite thing to get at Cosi is their flatbread pizza. I usually just get pepperoni, but every once and a while I treat myself to a BBQ chicken pizza of which I add bacon to. I have never had a bad experience from Cosi since I have started eating there and it has become my go-to choice for dining on campus. Before I know it, these 200 points are going to be gone because I have been eating at Cosi at least once every day this week.