Student Voices: Uh, guys? The Oreo cake tastes like fruit. (2024)

The first meal that I had with all the other kids at the High School Journalism Institute was lunch.

It was also the first time we all met each other.

I felt extremely nervous, not only because I was sharing my meal with strangers, but also because I tend to have terrible stomach issues in a new environment.

Since I felt nauseous, I decided to have a small salad. I immediately regretted that decision because I ended up needing more energy not long after, when faced with climbing a 30-feet pole at the Oregon State University challenge course for the ice breaker activity at the start of camp.

So, during dinner, the saga of trying the different dining hall foods began.

A week later, I have seen the good, the bad, the ugly, and the ‘okay’. Most of the food falls in the ‘okay’ category.

However, I want to showcase the foods that fall in the more extreme categories. So here is my review of the different kinds of foods at the OSU Marketplace West dining hall.

My qualifications are that I (sometimes) put together meals for myself at home and I took a culinary class during my freshman year of high school. Other than that, I just like eating good food.

The first place I go to after I swipe my meal card is the salad bar. I do have to say, breakfast, lunch and dinner, the dining hall has a basic yet fresh-looking salad bar. Everything that needs to be there is there. In the morning for breakfast, I always get a bowl of fruit mix filled with cantaloupe, honeydew, watermelon and red grapes. For lunch and dinner, there are mixed greens, tomatoes, cucumbers and other salad necessities. The salad bar has been the most consistent station in taste and quality during my time here.

The pizza, however, is a different story. I am a believer that pizza is pizza and it’s quite hard to mess it up. However, there are some days where I am afraid the crust is way too thick. Because of that, the pizza had been stuck in the ‘okay’ category until Wednesday evening, when all of a sudden, the crust was thin, there was good balance between the cheese and sauce, and it was overall a very satisfying experience. It never happened again.

Along with the pizza, my new friends and I decided to try out the funfetti blondie bars. With chunks of white chocolate, sprinkles and a cake-batter flavor, these bars were solid. Quite literally — there were no loose crumbs. As a blondie should be, it was slightly chewy and dense but also a little fluffy, almost like a cookie and cake hybrid.

My friends and I thought, ‘Wow, that was definitely one of the better meals we’ve had all week’, and that was the highest praise for the dining hall yet.

One of the funkiest and most deceptive things that I have eaten in my life was the Oreo cake. It was a chocolate sheet cake with cookies and cream frosting, and Oreo crumbles on top. As dark and chocolatey as the cake seemed, it tasted strangely like fruit at the first bite. It smelled strangely of markers as well. On the second bite, it tasted a little more like cake, and what resembled chocolate. It was as if all of the chocolate flavor of a chocolate cake was sucked out of it, but the color stayed intact.

But what I really took away from the meal times here was finding a table with all of my friends, making fun of the foods we thought tasted bad and feeling surprised at the good. Through sharing these meals three times a day, I have really warmed up and gotten close to the people here. I feel like I have found the sweetest and funniest people that I never would have met if it weren’t for sitting down with them for lunch on the first day.

Although working on my articles has been such an eye-opening experience, reporting, interviewing, writing and editing all day can take a lot of energy out of you. Sharing laughter and food with my new friends at the dining hall really helped me refuel myself — the good, the bad, the ugly and even the ‘okay.’

-- Juwon Kim

This story was produced by student reporters as part of the High School Journalism Institute, an annual collaboration among The Oregonian/OregonLive, Oregon State University and other Oregon media organizations. For more information or to support the program, go to oregonlive.com/hsji.