Such sarcastic remarks as "Well, I'm off to Valentine ... Lucky me" about our dining hall can be heard in dorm rooms across campus around every mealtime, uttered by students of all shapes and sizes. For many of us, bashing the food we eat is a cornerstone of the Amherst experience-a ritual in which everyone takes part. I am no exception. Taking the cue from my peers, I have expressed disappointment about stirfry, scrod and lasagna, but after thinking just how frequently we do this, I realized we are just too hard on the place.

I believe that such carping doesn't stem from the quality of the food so much as it does from the frequency of our visits there. If you eat breakfast, lunch and dinner each day, and you eat out or skip a meal once a week, you will eat at Valentine 280 or so times this semester. Before you graduate, even if you spend a term abroad, you'll eat at Valentine around two thousand times. Now imagine your favorite restaurant. Whenever you dine there, the food there may transport you into another realm (think "When Harry Met Sally"). But how appetizing does the prospect of eating there two thousand times over a four-year period sound? Now you are getting a firmer idea of the Herculean mission Valentine strives to accomplish: to satisfy well over a thousand customers, each of whom attends its eatery for every meal, over a very long period of time.

I'd love for someone to show me a place that could achieve this infallibly. Granted, Valentine is bigger than most restaurants, and we should expect more diversity and a larger menu than we would at Judie's or at D.P. Dough. Perhaps if there were an even greater variety of meals served, students wouldn't tire of Valentine so easily. But if neither of today's two main dining options is going to suit you and you start cursing the dining hall for its dearth of good choices, I don't think you are trying hard enough. Aside from the pizza and pasta that are almost always offered, you have the salad bar, soup, sandwich materials, cereal, tortillas and dessert, as well as a host of other foodstuffs that can be turned into a meal with the smallest of efforts. If this doesn't cut it for you, even though it really should, remember that Amherst is far from the largest institution on the planet. It wouldn't make sense for so small a place to expand its food offerings substantially for the sole purpose of eradicating every dissatisfaction with its breadth of options.

Many complain when they see that food from the previous day has undergone some sort of metamorphosis and awaits our mouths in an entirely different form. I'll never forget walking into Valentine one day and spying the corned beef hash pizza. Even I have to admit that this wasn't the wisest culinary decision ever made, but I think such creations give Valentine a good deal of character. Nobody forces you to eat them if you don't wish to do so. And, in general, I find that I digest my food much better knowing that my college isn't wasting what is still perfectly good food, even if it isn't straight out of the oven. Deep down, don't you think it would be fairly irresponsible and wasteful to do otherwise?

Valentine tries very hard to accommodate our desires, and it really shouldn't have to put more effort into satisfying them than it already does. Everyone who works there is very friendly and works hard to serve us our food. Valentine and all its employees deserve more credit than we give them. So the next time you find a hair in your food or your rice is undercooked, remember all the times that those kinds of things haven't happened and consider the statistical impossibility of them never happening once in your two thousand meals here. If at all possible, try to view Valentine with the innocent, unjaded eyes of a five-year-old. Look at all the bright colors, all the different types of food, all the helpful people, the ice cream, and remember that you don't really have it all that bad.