Peirce looks a little different this semester– it’s like Peircegiving every day! To take precaution against the coronavirus, the dining hall has had to switch from letting students dish out their own food to packaging it up into nice little boxes and sending us on our way. And who could blame them? We were gross! And to prove it, here are some things we used to do in Peirce that would be unimaginable to do now.

1. Ice Cream Cart: On occasion, the soft-serve machine would close and the Ice Cream Cart would open for business. This consisted of six buckets of ice cream and two scoops, which would be used over and over again by students sticking their dirty little arms 5 inches deep into a tub of ice cream and then dunking the scoop a vat of warm ice cream-water for the next goblin seeking sweets.
2. Juice: Having hundreds of students a day pressing the same button with their hands after they’ve just eaten isn’t the best idea during a pandemic. I wish I had appreciated my last cup of mango-orange-guava juice more, and I think this is something we can bring back once there’s a vaccine. But today, this would raise some serious health concerns.
3. Salad Bar and Deli: Thrill writer Jess Karan once saw someone “just reach into the salad bar and get a fistful of spinach.” This is upsetting in normal times, and completely outrageous during pandemic times. Let’s hope this never happens again. 
4. Trough: I mean, the Trough will be back eventually, but the melange of coffee, blue drink, and bits of egg was enough to churn stomachs even before a pandemic hit the world. 
5. Toast station: Forgetting how crowded this area used to get until about 11:30 every morning, the toast station had open containers of cream cheese and butter and an assortment of local jellies. This is the thing I miss most about Peirce. I keep telling myself it’ll be back one day, and that I still have two and a half more years at this school to get toast during extendo (another casualty of Coronavirus-Adjusted Peirce), but for now, we can’t exactly have 1,800 people breathing on open condiments all day. 
6. Midnight Breakfast/Valentine’s Day Kiddie Pool of Ice Cream: Do I really need to explain this one? When it was brought back for Valentine’s Day I could hardly believe my eyes. And to think that it wasn’t even that long ago! February fourteenth! Coronavirus was already in the news by then! Just two weeks later we were sent home, never to return! I think it’s safe to say we will never see another kiddie pool of ice cream in Peirce again.