At the Alma 1 restaurant at KU Leuven, they clearly had chicken cutlets, but they absolutely refused to let you buy one separately, stipulating that you could only buy it as part of a set meal (5.6 euros for students).
If the set meal didn’t include the combination you wanted, and you just wanted to add something extra—for example, the set meal originally included a chicken cutlet, vegetables, and rice, but you only wanted the chicken cutlet—that was absolutely impossible there. You had to buy a whole set meal. But by then, I had already eaten lunch and couldn’t possibly eat a second one.
Their reasoning was simply this: it wasn’t an option on the menu, so they couldn’t sell it. They even called over a person in charge, who came out looking at me with a surprised expression and asked, “What do you want?” After I repeated myself, they just looked at me with a very innocent expression and said, “No.” Either a set meal, or nothing at all.
This is highly contradictory:
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As far as I know, the cafeteria throws away a huge amount of food every day. This was told to me by a Moroccan Muslim staff member at Alma 2, who was kind enough to share what he witnessed regarding the daily waste. He said it made him feel very uneasy as a Muslim.
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They prefer to throw the food away rather than sell it to students in a more flexible way (such as selling it separately at half the price of a full meal, or finding other ways to sell it).
I really don’t know what they are thinking. Perhaps they don’t care whether they sell it or not, or perhaps for them, adhering to the established rules is far more important than making a profit or solving the food waste problem.