Food service failing students

(Photo: Bryn Karcha)

Dear Dr. Florizone,

The food situation on campus is pitiful. Students are paying Dal for a service they are failing to provide.

I confess the way to my heart is through my stomach, but the food at Dal makes me ill—literally. Like many students, I have food intolerances. I am allergic to dairy, soy and wheat.

The list of possible meals I can eat on campus is pathetic. I can have dry pakora at the Killam Bistro. I can have prepackaged sushi that’s been sitting out for who knows how long. I can build a salad at Pete’s ToGoGo. Everything else has ingredients I can’t eat.

“I have a hard time finding out what’s in the food,” says one lactose-intolerant student. “It gets expensive having to take a lactaid pill with every meal just in case. It’s better to know whether I have to take it or not. If I have something with milk or cheese in it and I didn’t take a pill, I feel sick for the rest of the day.”

Allergies are not the only concern. What about religious dietary restrictions? Where are the Kosher and Halal meals? What about ethical diet decisions? How much is Dal really accommodating vegans when they sneak dairy into everything?

Recently, Dal spent who knows how many hundreds of thousands of dollars to fly in dignitaries from around the globe for an inauguration ceremony. Why spend all that money on an elite gathering instead of providing proper nutrition for students?

People are paying Dal to feed them. In turn, Dal makes them ill by feeding them food they can’t eat, or forces them to abandon their religious or ethical principles. At the very least, the food Dal does provide needs to have a list of ingredients.

The sooner Dal starts offering better food, the sooner I’ll stop laughing when they try to promote student health.

Sincerely,

Leah Shangrow