Author: Mallory Nezam
Despite what your complaints may be about the monotony of eating on campus, the Campus Dining Department is making an effort to respond to students’ needs. What do we want? Just take a look at the suggestions section of the Campus Dining webpage. Students ask for anything from vegan baked goods to the strategic placing of recycling bins in the Cooler.
Campus Dining cannot accommodate every request, but they respond to all of them. Many requests turn into actual changes on campus. Some of the most common requests that this department receives are more food options for vegans and vegetarians, as well as local and organic products.
Every station at the Cooler and Marketplace offers both vegetarian and vegan options, and this semester is the first time the Homestyle station in the Marketplace is providing a vegan alternative for every lunch and dinner.
Both the Cooler and Marketplace provide a myriad of local and organic options, including organic items in the salad bar, the organic baked potato bar on Wednesdays with produce from local farmers, organic dinners in the Marketplace on Thursdays, a local brand of frozen yogurt, and fair-trade coffee.
Campus Dining even incorporates local and organic ingredients into its scratch cooking.
As Associate Vice-President of Hospitality Services Amy Muñoz says, “The demand for these items has definitely gone up. It’s becoming mainstream to eat in this manner.”
The Eagle Rock farmer’s market has even become a social event – attended every Friday by many Oxy students.
But Occidental is not the only place where vegan and vegetarian conversions are occurring; it’s all over the world. Even Oprah has turned vegan. Buying local and organic is also quite popular. According to Marsha Laux, the content specialist of the Agricultural Marketing Resource Center at Iowa State University, “Organics have grown at a rate of nearly 20 percent per year for the last seven years.”
Likewise, Michael S. Rosenwald of the Washington Post writes that “people who want to feed both their bodies and their social consciences [have been asking] themselves, ‘What good is eating organic if it’s been trucked 3,000 gas-guzzling miles across the country?'”
Beyond what you see in the frosty freezers and soup cauldrons, there is a lot going on behind the scenes; and responses to suggestions on the Campus Dining website are only the beginning.
Student employee for Campus Dining Katie Presley (senior) is working amongst colleges on a project called The Real Food Challenge. “The goal is to make 20 percent of what Oxy buys local, organic, natural, fair-trade,” Presley said.
Our affiliation with an organization whose motto is “Uniting students for just and sustainable food” indicates that Campus Dining is not only responding to students’ needs, but is taking its own initiative to investigate healthier and more socially-conscious food products.
To access the suggestions section of the Campus Dining website visit http://www.oxy.edu/x4812.xml. To find out more about The Real Food Challenge visit http://www.realfoodchallenge.org/.
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