Student Voice: Uh, guys? Oreo cake tastes like fruit.

The first meal I had with all the other kids at the High School Journalism Institute was lunch.

It was also the first time we all met.

I felt extremely nervous, not only because I was sharing my meal with strangers, but also because I tend to have terrible stomach problems in new environments.

Feeling nauseous, I decided to eat a small salad. I immediately regretted this decision, as I ended up needing more energy shortly after when I had to climb a 30-foot pole on the Oregon State University obstacle course for the icebreaker activity at the beginning of camp.

So, during dinner, the saga of tasting the different dishes in the dining room began.

A week later, I saw the good, the bad, the ugly, and the “fair.” Most foods fall into the “fair” category.

However, I want to highlight foods that fall into the more extreme categories. So here are my thoughts on the different types of foods offered at the OSU Marketplace West dining hall.

My qualifications are that I (sometimes) cook meals for myself at home and I took a cooking class my freshman year of high school. Other than that, I just love eating good food.

The first place I go after swiping my meal card is the salad bar. I have to say that for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, the dining room has a basic but fresh salad bar. Everything that needs to be there is there. In the morning, for breakfast, I always get a mixed fruit bowl filled with cantaloupe, honeydew melon, watermelon, and red grapes. For lunch and dinner, there are mixed greens, tomatoes, cucumbers, and other must-have salads. The salad bar has been the most consistent item in terms of taste and quality during my stay here.

Pizza, on the other hand, is a different story. I am a firm believer that pizza is pizza and it is pretty hard to mess up. However, there are days when I worry that the crust is too thick. Because of this, the pizza stayed in the “okay” category until Wednesday night, when all of a sudden the crust was thin, there was a good balance of cheese and sauce, and it was an overall very satisfying experience. It never happened again.

In addition to the pizza, my new friends and I decided to try the funfetti blondie bars. With white chocolate chunks, sprinkles, and a cake batter flavor, these bars were solid. Literally, there were no crumbs. As a blondie should be, it was slightly chewy and dense but also a little chewy, almost like a cookie and cake hybrid.

My friends and I thought, “Wow, that was definitely one of the best meals we’ve had all week,” and that was the highest praise for the dining room so far.

One of the strangest and most deceptive things I’ve ever eaten was Oreo cake. It was a chocolate cake with cookies and cream frosting and Oreo crumbs on top. As dark and chocolatey as the cake looked, it tasted suspiciously like fruit at first bite. It also smelled suspiciously like markers. By the second bite, it tasted more like cake and more like chocolate. It was like all the chocolate flavor of chocolate cake had been sucked out of it, but the color was still intact.

But what I really took away from these meals here was finding a table with all my friends, laughing at the foods we thought were bad, and being surprised by the good ones. By sharing these meals three times a day, I really got closer to the people here. I feel like I met the kindest and funniest people I would have ever met if I hadn’t had lunch with them on the first day.

While working on my articles has been a very rewarding experience, reporting, interviewing, writing, and editing all day can be extremely draining. Sharing laughter and food with my new friends in the dining hall has really helped me recharge: the good, the bad, the ugly, and even the “good.”

–Juwon Kim

This story was produced by student reporters as part of the High School Journalism Institute, an annual collaboration between The Oregonian/OregonLive, Oregon State University and other Oregon media organizations. For more information or to support the program, visit oregonlive.com/hsji.