 When students trade their high school diplomas for college dorm rooms, friends and family wish them luck and tell them to enjoy their new-found freedom by “going nuts.” But while most students blow off steam by partying until the wee hours of the morning, some students at Columbia University seem to have taken the “go nuts” advice a little too literally. According to the Columbia Spectator,the Ivy League institution introduced Nutella to its campus dining halls last month, hoping to give its students a taste of luxury living (because living on the Upper West Side of New York City is clearly "roughing it"). To the administration’s surprise, students’ demand for Nutella quickly exploded to the tune of 100 pounds consumed per day. But consuming the “breakfast food” in the dining room wasn’t enough for some of the sticky-fingered undergrads, who ultimately decided to abscond with the buttery, chocolaty, hazelnut spread by the jar. According to a New York Times article, other Facebook members put their thinking caps on to work out the total cost of 100 pounds of Nutella, coming up with $5,000 per week. “‘They took the 100 pounds and used it as a hard fact’ in doing math on the Facebook page,” Bailinson told the Times. “I quickly commented, ‘More than 100 pounds was a rough guess, I don’t have the hard figures.’” Reyes told CNN she reached out to Dunn for comment, but was unable to reach the dining director regarding the pricy crepe filling. “I was told their policy is not to comment on numbers from dining,” she said in a phone interview with CNN. “But they would neither confirm nor deny the $5,000.” CNN obtained a tongue-in-cheek e-mail exchange between Assistant Vice President of Media Relations Robert Hornsby and Columbia University officials denying press reports claiming that campus dining halls were “running rivers of nut-brown ink to the tune of $5,000 per week in allegedly pilfered Nutella.” “It is true that in the first 3-4 days after Nutella was recently added to the dining hall selections, demand was indeed extraordinarily high, with students enjoying a large amount in that initial short period,” Hornsby wrote in the e-mail. “However, the actual cost was only about $2,500, and quickly went down to $450 per week for dining halls that serve some 3,600 students, seven days a week at three locations.” “Ironically the media attention to Nutella-gate has cut down on the amount people have been taking in recent days,” Hornsby added. According to the Dining Advisory Committee Minutes from the Columbia College Student Council’s website, thefts from the dining halls are not limited to just Nutella. “Dining spends $50,000 a year replacing things like plates, silverware and Sriracha sauce!” said the website. “This is money that could be spent on new products like Speculoos, and keeping products like Jamba Juice around for years to come. Now while I have no idea what a “speculoos” is [Editor's note: it's essentially a spiced cookie or a cookie spread, and you're totally missing out.], I do know that it was a rite of passage in my day for college students to “liberate” food from the cafeteria – from Lucky Charms to chocolate chip cookies, anything you could fit in a white Styrofoam coffee cup was fair game. But when did it become socially acceptable to steal entire cans or jars of food? Turns out, there are entire articles devoted to stealing from dining halls – from sneaking out five gallon bags of soy milk to rice that can last all week long. And in case you need a play-by-play on how to steal, here’s a hint: don’t get caught. Previously: |
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Not to worry. ;) I bring them home and throw them away there.
Please ignore above, wrong thread.
I live in the midwest and everyone knows we are 10 years behind everything. Yet I have know about this stuff for years. If Nutella is luxury living, then I live like a freakin queen.
These students are about to learn some lessons about the freshman 15.
WHO tells their kids that are going off to college to "go nuts"? Trying to be clever and punny just comes off stupid when it's not something people actually do.
You know, you can get Nutella at Walmart, right?
I know–this isn't a rare, hard to get item. And I love the whole tone of the article that pretty much encourages theft. Funny, haha. I would spank my kids' behinds if they ever stole anything, no matter how small.
Go nuts? With nutella yay this is funny WE like nutella is the school giving it out for free?About time skip the $6 jar at mad mart!
The article describes Nutella as "buttery". Last time I checked the label, the first two ingredients were palm oil and sugar. Yuck!
I agree, there is nothing even remotely buttery about Nutella.
Try it you'll love it
just some rich @ssholes preparing for their futures in the corporate world when they plan on fleecing millions from their employees and shareholders.
I really hate stupid lazy "journalists" who add the suffix "gate" to every story that even slightly resembles a scandal. Watergate was the name of a hotel it belonged in the name of that story 40 years ago. It hasn't belonged in the name of any story since!
How 'bout just plain stupid people who are unable grasp the concept of parody?
how about BAD parody? Parody is not an excuse for poorly written, unfunny trash.
I voted "other" because I would usually walk out with an apple or a banana, but while technically it is liberating food, I always thought that was OK, if not expected. I certainly never tried to hide it and no one ever looked askance.
Nutella's not bad–a little goes a long way. Definitely would rather have a "Space Food Stick" (remember those from Pillsbury?–early 70's)!
Never swiped food from the cafeteria, but I did occasionally put on a backpack and go around to various campus buildings after hours (secure buildings, but always some way in) and visit all the restrooms and janitor's closets to "gank"( 80's-90's slang) rolls of toilet paper and paper towels. That stuff was expensive!
I don't get it. If you are on the meal plan, you're not swiping a banana, your meal plan covers it. If you on a pay as you go, then you are stealing and you very well know it.
Gank comes from the television series SUPERNATURAL.
They use it in the sense that means 'kill' or 'destroy.'
Wow, this is a poorly written article. Why do I keep coming back to this site for news?
I love the way you think, John. Thanks for your support.
Because they don't have any news at Fox News. You've got to get it from somewhere...
Americans are always behind the curve. Nutella....bleh. Belgian speculoos, however, is to DIE for. And yes, they even sell it if you look carefully enough at regular US grocery stores these days.
Trader Joe's in Southern California has it. It was so tasty – my family and I can go through a jar in a couple of days.
These kids are paying thousands of dollars every 6 months to their universities. Sure, I guess it is technically stealing but it was bought for them and paid by them so.....
You Americans are so unsophisticated and undignified...You celebrate your children stealing poor quality "food" yet you have the ignorance to call Europeans "socialist". You wallow in your ignorance. Like little children with your chicken nuggets.
hey man, sorry you got named after your aunt
Psychotic much, bigot?
Right, because students from one of the best schools in the world hoarding large amounts of Nutella equals unsophistication and a lack of dignity... Why be such a jerk over such a trivial article? No need.
J, I think you may be missing the humor here. It's probably due to the stick up your butt. Pull it out and stop pretending all Americans are alike. You should be embarrassed to be so provincial.
Hahaha you socialist turd... you're just upset you don't live in the best country in the world... go eat some spotted dick with those nasty chompers that were once teeth
Just ignore him. He's probably a 13 year old american kid trolling all of you.
If he's not, he's just a sad example of how easy it was for the nazi movement to be so popular in europe.
They just love to hate everyone that's not them.
I LOVE Nutella!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
If you don't love it,then you don't love life and I PITY your PATHETIC existence!!(if ou can even call not-loving nutella existing).....
Nutella gets its texture from palm oil.... congratulations... you're in for a quadruple bypass. Don't forget that when you are croaking, after saying not loving nutella was not loving life.
it must be sad to live an empty life?If you call that 'living'
What is really sad is that "reward" and "food" are the same thing to you, much like a dog.
Yeah, because 60,000,000 Italians are the face of unhealthyness in this world. Gimme a break. Nutella, I love you!
I hate Nutella!
Well Good. MORE FOR ME
It tastes good but I refuse to purchase a product that has as its main ingredient, sugar. There are copies of it that have hazelnuts listed as the main ingredient an they taste better (not so very sweet).
nutella has been around for...decades and americans just discovered it? wow...
"americans just discovered it?" Nope, apparently just the kids at this one college. I live in Nowhere, Ga, and they've sold it here since the 70s at least.
I grew up in Germany for 10 years (1981 to mid 1992). Nutella was a staple breakfast food for German kids in the 80s. I'm suprized it took so long to get to the US....same thing with Toblerone, Ritter Sport and Ferrero.
Ritter Sport is fantastic. I was able to find it in the Bay Area in the 90s, but not outside of California easily.
If there is something out there that's better than Nutella I don't need to know what it is.
There is–Vegemite!
peanut butter and marshmallow fluff for a fluffanutter sandwich!
nutella sucks monkey balls
Why all the hooplah over hazlenut butter(like peanut butter)?Big f'ing hairy deal.I make homemade cashew butter-get a clue.
Because Lady Gaga loves it
It's not Hazelnut butter. It's chocolate....with hazelnut extract. It's pretty much liquid Hershey.
Actually it is a hazelnut spread... ground up roasted hazelnuts not the extract... and VERY little cocoa.... just enough to give a chocolate flavor.... they can't call it a chocolate hazelnut spread because it has too low a percentage of cocoa... Ferrero uses a MASSIVE amount of hazlenuts to produce nutella and other products.
What's great about nutella versus peanut butter is that the more peanut butter you use the better something is... but with nutella... the less you use the better it is.
I LOVE chocolate but I think Nutella is absolutely nasty tasting.
I agree with you on that. A friend tried to get me excited about Nutella when we visited Europe about a decade ago. I just thought it tasted nasty.
yo mamma was pretty nasty tasting.Tell her to take a shower more then once a week
it's not the chocolate, it's the hazelnuts...hazelnuts have a bitter edge to them. I can't stand anything with hazelnuts
Who decided this was newsworthy?
You did the second you decided to actually take the time to read and post.
Haha, nice one Steve.... and the Bavarian probably read the entire article. I always get a kick out of those replies like, "I can't see why CNN prints this crap, I don't even bother reading" (then goes on to city a dozen things they didn't like in the article.
SO THESE SOB COLLEGE SWINE ..... THINK THEY DON'T HAVE TO PAY THEIR FAIR SHARE AND THEY STEAL ...... THAT SHOWS THEY ARE TOTAL HYPOCRITES !!!!!!!!!!!
LOUD...and hyperbolic.
If you actually read the article it was a big blow up over nothing. And it's pretty hard to "steal things" from a college cafeteria. If you're on the x number of meals per day you just store your leftovers. It's not illegal, so there's pretty much no stealing from most college cafeteria unless it's the staff doing it.
The stuff tastes like CHOCOLATE ICING!! What do they expect will happen when it's put out with a "take-all-you-want" air about it. Now it will probably disappear, or be put behind as counter, where you have to pay for it or go thru the line again...
CNN continues to write sloppy, unedited articles! Check your math, people...
Use spell check, as well!
Speaking of unedited... nice abundant use of commas.
. . . 'snot her fault. Her Grammar was closely related to her Grampy.
Justin's Chocolate Hazlenut Butter is more expensive but much healthier than Nutella, which has far too much sugar and other additives.
That right there is where the "Freshman 15" comes from. Easy on the Nutella kids, it may be delicious but it's not an every day thing.
eating this stuff is NO different than eating cr ap cake frosting from a jar
Nutella is awesomly delicious, but the first ingredient listed on the label is sugar.
I prefer Dark Chocolate Almond Butter. It is sweetened but the first ingredient listed is almonds.
Both are like eating cake frosting – yum!
Maranatha Dark Chocolate Almond Butter
Back when I was in college, the cafeteria food wasn't worth 'liberating'.
The food wasn't worth swiping when I was in school either. I lived well off of 7 courses meals 2-3 times a day. 6 pack of beer and a bag of chips.
I refused to eat in the cafeteria as the food was awful as is Nutella! I despise anything with hazelnut!
Nutella is sweetened fat, and hydrogenated fat at that. Why would that even be part of the food plan?
Because it's unspeakably delicious.
SHEEPLE.
Really now, you are a ph***tard
The problem is because of limited meal plan options, i.e., having to pay for more meals on the lowest plan available (just like minimal text message cell phomne plans that require 250). Special dining plans do not increase or decrease taking food outr of the cafeteria. If your meal plan paid for it, it is yours. A lot of food gets wasted. The surplus from the meal plans not used by students goes into catering events for staff and faculty, campus guests, so there is a break even. I remember undercooked turkey for Thanksgiving that costs extra per person and food running out mpre than an hour before closing on the Christmas menu. One disgusted, hungry student picked up a gingerbread house and left. Trust me, staff gladly gets to divide the goods after such celebrations, Other times, they can get into trouble for taking things home like unopened, unused sealed cereal boxes during regular service. The surplus is not often donated to students or the community. CU Alumni Family (Generations) That Will NOT Donate Another Dime For Serious Reasons
Let me clarify special dining plans as vegetarian, Kosher, etc. A lot of students with surplus meal stand by the entrance asking people if they need food so that they can give away the meals they will not use. The cereal boxes I mentioned were on student trays that had been taken to the discard area. An older man who gathered these to give to a food pantry got ratted out, busted and fired. From Columbia Dissenter
I used to "liberate" (lol) food from the cafeteria; mainly cold cuts and bread, but I also had an unlimited dining plan. So I paid for that food whether I ate it or not. The time I was sick with the flu, I couldn't set foot in that cafeteria for 3 days and I certainly wasn't refunded.
WRT Nutella-that stuff is yummy, yummy, yummy, which is why I NEVER keep it around. Way too easy to over indulge.
Why don't you let them know that Nutella contain a chemical substance call " PHTHALATES " OR PEPH
that is hazardous to human health, it creates hormone imbalance.
Not sure I would eat any of this stuff, let alone steal it...
Nutella contains 70% saturated fat and processed sugar by weight, as well as partially hydrogenated vegetable oil and trans fat. A two-tablespoon serving of Nutella contains 200 calories, 11 grams of fat, 3.5 of which are saturated and 21 grams of sugar. To put that into perspective, a typical chocolate and nut candy bar has 250 to 300 calories and 12 to 16 grams of fat. The main ingredients of Nutella are sugar and palm oil, followed by hazelnut, cocoa solids, and skimmed milk. In the United States, Nutella contains soy products. Nutella is marketed as "hazelnut cream" in many countries. Under Italian law, it cannot be labeled as a chocolate cream, as it does not meet minimum cocoa solids concentration criteria. About half of the calories in Nutella come from fat (11 g in a 37 g serving, or 99 kcal out of 200 kcal) and about 40% of the calories come from sugar (20 g, 80 kcal).
"Under Italian law" is an... intriguing concept these days, but leaving that aside, it's a potentially interesting fact that Nutella was actually designed with such a low cocoa content on purpose, in a period (mid-1960s, IIRC) when cocoa was cripplingly expensive in Italy. It took the people at Ferrero quite a while to come up with a formula that worked both economically and culinarily... and of course, in the 1960s, nobody much was interested in doing the kind of exhaustive math you just did to analyze food products.
(Mind you, even today, when many more people are interested in doing that math, it's still of questionable utility in everyday life. Calories are calories. Which parts of the food contribute which proportion of them is not entirely relevant when they're all going into a person's cakehole together. :)
You forgot to mention how delicious it is!
Thanks for sharing nutritional facts and a potent case to avoid empty calories.
Pssst. Hey you. I got some of the good stuff right here. An unopened jar of Nutella, only $50 a pound.
Seriously? You can buy a jar for $4 at the local store.
Couldn't get past the first two paragraphs of this "story". Everything could have been said in that amount of space.
Speculoos is a cookie made in Belgium. It is very popular and they are made in special mold. You also find it as a spread or in chocolate, ice cream,...You can order a cup of coffee at a "cafe" and you might get it with a small speculoos to eat with it.
Food? Not a chance. Only a lunatic would steal food from a college cafeteria.
Flatware, on the other hand...
I would only take the occasional soda from the DH, I never once took food without paying for it.
while I have no idea what a “speculoos” is :
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=speculoos
LOL
I think taking food out of the cafeteria is socially acceptable, because as a college student with a full/unlimited meal plan, you're essentially paying the school for ALL your meals. Students crunched for time will often find it easier to slide out with a bagel or a piece of fruit on their way to class than to sit down and enjoy their breakfast. The logic is, we've already paid for it–so it shouldn't really matter where we eat it.
However, I think taking the whole jar of Nutella does cross the line into stealing. Condiments are there for everyone to take a small serving. You're not only making the school have to replace the condiment over and over, but you're also taking it away from others who want some. If you want a jar for dorm-snacking, you should go to Walmart and buy your own jar of Nutella.
$5/lb X 100lb = $5,000? Must be liberal arts grads writing these articles. :)
If you look at the NY Times article, it says it's 100 pounds per day. Apparently CNN doesn't know the difference between 1 day and 1 week.
It was a mistake that slipped by me in the editing process and it's fixed now. Thanks for spotting!
As long as they are really eating it, who cares? This is only an issue if they are being wasteful.
'family wish them luck and tell them to enjoy their new-found freedom by “going nuts.” ' This ever happen to anyone? Did your dad tell you to go nuts at college? Have any of you ever told your kids that? Doubt it.
We steal from our cafeterias to compensate for the absurd amount of money the administration embezzles out of our tuition.
I don't know if you'd call it "stealing," you just took the maximum that was allowed to be taken for a meal to go. I could probably stuff two meals worth of food into a styrofoam container (assuming it wasn't stuff that had a lot of liquids), plus a bit for late night snacking. With that, if I needed to cut back expenses and instead get less meals for the semester I could almost literally cut my alotted university meals in half.
You know with as much as we pay for our kids to go to these colleges and with the meal plans they could include something like this in the plan.
Nutella isnt $50/lb, more like $5 if that for a total of $500 per week, someone needs remedial math.
Exactly right. Who are these math-challenged bozos? This would never happen at MIT.
MIT? Never heard of it. Now Caltech, the rock stars of the science and engineering world, yeah, we know them.
The NY Times says it's 100 pounds per day, CNN made it per week. It's within an order of magnitude.
Easy to figure out who's doing it, watch who gets fat.
It is obviously the Obama supporters. Typical liberal mentality of "It's all mine and it's all free!"
More likely a republican, they consume first read nutritional facts later.
An furthermore, how is something they are paying with there tuition taking?
Fugin idiot.
Reyes told CNN she reached out to Dunn for comment, but was unable to reach the dining director regarding the pricy crepe filling. “I was told their policy is not to comment on numbers from dining,” she said in a phone interview with CNN. “But they would neither confirm nor deny the $5,000.”
Seriously?? They didnt want the "trade secret" of how much Nutella had gone missing to come out??
If you Nutella, I tella
If I took anything it was typically an apple or two for later on, but if I had a late night cram session planned then it was sandwiches, chips, cookies and if I could've figure out how to get soda then that too was fair game.