Nutella-Gate Exposed: It's a Smear!
March 7, 2013
(Not April 1)—Columbia University officials today denied press reports claiming that campus dining halls were running rivers of nut-brown ink to the tune of $5,000 per week in allegedly pilfered Nutella.
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Columbia further denied that the Comp Lit department was joining with the University's Nobel Prize winning neuroscientists in an NSF-funded interdisciplinary study of the Proustian impact of Nutella on human memory.
The Athletics Department denied that, instead of firing tee-shirts off into the stands during basketball timeouts, Roar-ee the Lion would henceforth hurl those little snack-packs of Nutella and pretzels (though it actually sounds like a pretty good idea, no?)
It is not true that the New Media and Cybersecurity centers at the Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering analyzed a trending YouTube video purporting to show a pig carrying a jar of Nutella to a hungry goat at the suburban Lamont-Doherty campus and found it to be a fraud. Film at 11.
The mundane fact, according to the University's Division of Dining Services, is that the weekly cost of the Nutella supply is actually less than 10 percent of the amount originally reported on a student blog and quickly picked up by other media.
In the first three to four days after Nutella was added to the dining hall selections, demand was extraordinarily high, with students enjoying a large amount in that short initial period. The actual cost was only around $2,500, and quickly dropped to $450 per week for dining halls that serve some 3,600 students, seven days a week at three campus locations. Happily, the media attention to Nutella-gate has cut down on the amount people have been taking in recent days.
"I mean, who can resist a sweet story involving hazelnut spread?" asked Columbia's chief digital officer Sree Sreenivasan, a noted Nutella nut and social media maven. "I've already retweeted this thing in several time zones myself since I assumed it to be true just based on the Nutella consumption in my house." (Editor's note: Sree didn't say any of this... but he easily could have.)
—by Columbia News Staff
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Multimedia
| Artworks by contemporary Cambodian artists, including survivors of the Khmer Rouge genocide, are on display at Columbia’s Maison Française and Italian Academy. |
Milestones
Four Columbia faculty were awarded Sloan Research Fellowships by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. They are Mark Churchland, assistant professor of neuroscience; Wei Min, assistant professor of chemistry; Simha Sethumadhavan, associate professor of computer science; and Wei Zhang, assistant professor of mathematics.
Alondra Nelson, associate professor of sociology, won the 2012 book award from the Association for Humanist Sociology for Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination.
