Where students socialize and eat
West Union is decorate with many COVID-safety reminders such as arrows that direct the flow of traffic, signs that mandate mask-wearing, and stickers of feet placed six feet apart that instruct people where to stand.
Conversations between students, clang of dish return machine, Sprout worker helping student order.
The emptiness of WU is resounding. Being able to parse out individual conversations indicates that WU is rather quiet. In normal times, one would not be able to hear any individual conversations at all. The lack of silence does not equate to liveliness.
A Duke Card scanning into Bryan Center, side conversations among students dining, someone shaking their salad container, a skateboard rushing by.
Students gravitate to the BC on sunny days. Students opt to eat with friends outside while the weather is pleasant enough. The BC is a needed break from dining in one’s dorm room. This behavior is not new to the time of COVID.
Before the pandemic, meal time was synonymous with social time for many Duke students. Students used lunch and dinner to catch up with friends, talk about their days, and procrastinate work. Asking someone to “grab a meal” was also a convenient way to catch up with acquaintances; it provided the perfect window where students could catch up with someone they knew, but weren’t particularly close with. These meals were low stress social opportunities that students could make a quick escape from by saying they had class or had to get back to studying if the conversation went dry.
COVID drastically changed students’ eating habits as eating no longer became a carefree activity, but an activity that had to be methodically planned out. The areas where students are allowed to eat in are severely restricted during COVID. Gone are the sprawling tables and chairs in West Union that students used to have to fight over during peak meal times. Instead, students are limited to eating in their dorm room, common room, apartment, or any space they could find outside around campus. With limited seating, the way in which students can socialize while eating has dramatically changed.
Instead of ordering food at each vendor, students are now able to order food in advance, using the Duke Dine-Out Mobile Order. This enables students to quickly get in and out of WU, which limits the amount of socializing students once did as they waited in line for food.
The limited dining areas also impacts how many people students are able to eat to. Instead of being able to eat at communal tables with a large group of friends, students are now tasked with finding spaces that are large enough to enable properly social distanced eating. Because of this, the size of the groups students eat in is much smaller than previous years.
There are fewer dining options for students this year. Staples such as Div Cafe and the Law School shuttered their doors, forcing students who live on campus to spend their food points at vendors inside West Union or on Merchants on Points, a food delivery service.
Off-campus students have also largely turned to cooking as a cheaper alternative to spending money for on-campus food. Cooking for many has become a social activity.
At the same time, however, cooking also limits social interaction. Unlike on-campus eating, in which students can reach out to anyone to grab a meal, cooking is a much more siloed activity, typically done with roommates. Cooking with friends is much less spontaneous that campus dining, which limits the amount of socialization that can take place.
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