Aramark is bad because they are a large corporation, and they run food as a mass production operation. You can’t mass produce good food. It simply isn’t possible. The food has to wait, and the taste and texture degrades every second between the time it is cooked and the time it hits the fork.
They don’t hire trained chefs. They hire cooks. The cooks don’t care whether the food is overcooked because Aramark has a monopoly. The cooks never get to see a customer. Their jobs don’t depend on individual eaters. They depend on the corporation. The customer is the university. The university doesn’t have taste buds.
The only way the university tastes things is if students make a mass protest. That’s hard to organize, and anyway, students come and go. Administrators may also come and go, but they always follow the course of least resistance. They don’t make extra money by pleasing students’ taste buds.
So there is no incentive for good food in a university, unless there is sustained mass protest. That can only last for so long.
One other way to pressure schools is to have these score cards that do score food. But even so, students, and I mean no disrespect, really don’t care that much about food as food. They are in the fuel stage of their lives. They eat to eat, not to taste. Most of them, anyway.
So those are all the theoretical reasons why Aramark sucks at making good food. They are great at mass producing food-like substances. And that’s what their job is. It isn’t to make good tasting food.
Anyway, look for schools with smaller food preparing organizations, or where there are student run coops or individual chefs in houses—that is where you will find good good on campus.