Imagine stepping out of your barracks and finding multiple food options within walking distance: a dining hall with several micro-restaurant concepts, a grab-and-go market for essentials or even a coffee shop. That’s what real campus-style dining looks like.

Right now, the Army is trying to replicate that model. Several modernization initiatives are underway, fighting through layers of bureaucracy, outdated policy and institutional inertia. The goal? To improve the soldier dining experience and increase meal card entitlement usage. But even with those efforts, one must ask: Is the university dining model truly generalizable to the military setting?

Before my time as an Army dietitian, I worked in university dining at Ohio University. Even in the early 2000s, the student dining environm

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