A new committee, designed to platform and assist students with food concerns, hosted its first meeting this week. In the same week, a resolution urging Hamline to cut ties with Aramark altogether was passed unanimously by Hamline University’s Student Council (HUSC). Now, students wonder what changes will be implemented.
For students who call Hamline’s campus home, the dining services offered are what they rely on for sustenance and nutrition during their time living here. As Aramark continues to be unpopular among students both for food quality and ethical practices as a company, the new Food Advisory Committee hopes to be able to improve upon some of these issues.
After years of student complaints about Hamline’s food options for on-campus dining, Director of Residential Life Yolanda Hansen teamed up with the Director of Dining Services, Nick Ortega, to create the Food Advisory Committee (FAC), a forum for students to communicate their food needs, sensitivities and preferences in the hopes that their words will be heard and changes will be implemented.
Hansen had experienced an open discussion at another institution and wanted to create something similar at Hamline. Hansen said that she heard jokes, or indirectly heard about students’ complaints about food options at Hamline, so once she had the time, she wanted to set up an outlet for students’ complaints to not only be heard, but for action to be taken.
“It was brought up to me a couple of years back that we should do something like this, but I never had the bandwidth at the time,” Hansen said. “It came up again in my goal-setting…so I reached out to Nick and told him it was really incumbent upon him [to be involved].”
For Ortega, community outreach like this is personally important.
“Student connections are everything,” Ortega said. “For a lot of the students, especially the underclassmen, this is their home, so [I am] trying to create an environment, and sustain and maintain an environment that they’re not coming to eat in some institutionalized kind of dining, but trying to make it a homey feeling.”
For students, this effort is appreciated, but the realities of depending on the food at Hamline have been hard to face. Sophomore Cannon Yerama attended the first FAC meeting hoping that his concerns would be addressed and that changes would be implemented, but was disappointed with the meeting itself.
“I am pleased that it happened, but I am dissatisfied with the results…almost every answer they gave just felt like an excuse…instead of saying ‘Okay, we messed up here, here’s a plan of action,’ they just gave a thousand excuses,” Yerama said. “I probably won’t be going to future meetings because of that, because I am just expecting the same result from them.”
Former student Ella Peterson left Hamline after just one semester, partly due to a lack of options to accommodate her gluten allergy.
“Technically they had a gluten-free-slash-vegan station … however, they only had vegan labeled things, and the thing with vegan food is a lot of the time it does have gluten in it, and there were no allergen alerts or anything on any of the food,” Peterson said. “They didn’t always have a vegan-slash-gluten-free meal. They had a little station with gluten-free bread and a gluten-free toaster, however, the bread very often was moldy.”
Many student complaints have been centered around accessibility and meal plan accommodations for students with varied needs, but Hansen ensures that for students who need accommodations for their meal plans at Hamline, every situation can be accommodated with a letter that supports the individual’s circumstances.
“Any situation that comes up, as long as I have a strong letter of support, we are absolutely able to work with people,” Hansen said.
If students need accommodation for a food allergy or sensitivity and need a note from a healthcare professional, Hansen said that Hamline’s Counseling and Health Services is able to provide the necessary documentation, including for first-years who have just arrived on campus, and that religious leaders, including Chaplain Kelly Figueroa-Ray and Rabbi Esther Adler, can provide documentation for students needing religious accommodations.
The next meeting of the FAC will take place on a Tuesday in Oct., though the exact date has yet to be announced.