I wonder if making a sticky topic would give some control over it. It might lock that text in the top row in the table.
I can see why people might want to customize the display there, but I personally don’t think it looks bad. Just for the sake of exploring another possibility, it might even be that the table-row view is better than a meta description in some cases.
It looks like a site gets only 98 pixels of vertical space when it shows the meta description:
But it gets 165 pixels of vertical space when it shows the table-row view, pushing down competing sites:
(Checked in Firefox with the zoom reset to zero.)
In either case, it looks like Google picked up this longer meta description already, so it should be possible to optimize the meta description in a way that causes Google to display it:
