food service area -- anyone could come into the dining hall for free) is a no-brainer. Back in the dark ages when I was a student at Middlebury, we were both required to check in for meals (i.e. show a school i.d. card and get our unique student i.d. number checked off the list of those who'd paid for a meal plan) as well as limit ourselves (in theory -- in practice, there was really no way to tell in the pre-computer age) to one meal per mealtime. I don't think it struck any of us as onerous to have to show an i.d. to establish we were students who had paid for the meal plan and were thus entitled to eat; nor did we feel limited in our abilities to socialize with friends -- to the contrary, we usually lingered for most of the meal time at most meals. It is true that being limited to one dinner per day meant you had to choose the location, but this wasn't much of an impediment because most people knew where their friends were likely to be, or switched back and forth for lunch and dinner (or on different days) to meet up with different groups. Our son's much more recent experience seems much the same, in terms of how often he ate the same meal on a particular day and where he ate. Even this small loss of flexibility could be addressed in a swipe system by allowing for a