Kelly in Kansas

The Chronicle: 1/28/2005: Chicken Strips and Pizza Please the Masses: "By LAWRENCE BIEMILLER

Athens, Ga.
For many University of Georgia students, comfort food is Chef Boyardee ravioli. The university's food service has experimented with upscale ravioli offerings, but students don't want fancy stuff -- they want Chef Boyardee. At lunch and dinner.

They also want cereal to be available all day. And they want chicken strips. Lots of chicken strips. The food service's cooking-school-trained chefs can put lemon-pepper orange roughy and cauliflower polonaise on the menu all they like, but what students can't get enough of are chicken strips.

And pizza, of course. The pizza station at the university's Snelling Dining Commons goes through a dozen cases of frozen pizza dough a day -- enough for 600 16-inch pizzas -- and stays busy till it closes at midnight. The pizza station, which the food service calls Giorgio's, offers traditional toppings, like pepperoni, mushrooms, and Italian sausage, but it also turns out chipotle chicken pizza, chicken fajita pizza, and even 'McCheeseburger' pizza.

J. Michael Floyd, the food-services director, sees only good in students' tastes. Ravioli, pizza, and especially cereal are cheap to serve, and they help balance out the cost of chicken strips, which are more expensive. By giving students what they want, he's both keeping them happy and keeping average food costs low enough that he can splurge now and then on special events like the Five Star Dinner, which celebrates the many awards the food service has won. He can also afford to pay for Saturday-night 'premium entrees,' like steak or shellfish,"

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Whatever makes our students happy? The only thing they seemed to have left out is McDonald's - another college student food group.