Serving about 27,000 students each semester has never been easy for Michigan State University dining room staff. But today, the work brings an even greater challenge: one in six students has an allergy or other dietary restriction. Five years ago that was still one in eight.
Leading up to this fall semester, Kelsey Patterson, the school’s registered dietitian, responded to reports from 300 parents and students about dietary restrictions, including life-threatening allergies and a host of special diets based on health, environmental, religious or personal. to assure
To tackle allergies on their own, two dining room chefs, Jordan Durkin and Brittany Lesage, enlisted an outside company to approve every new ingredient used at Thrive at Owen, a four-year-old food hall free from the top nine food allergens listed by the Food and Drug Administration. They taught staff how to prevent allergens from entering the Thrive kitchen, and came up with a rotating menu that excludes basic ingredients such as milk, eggs and wheat.
They’re repeating the process again next year, so new students will have to deal with a different set of dietary restrictions. “You think you dialed one in, and then something new comes along,” Mr. Durkin said.
Running a student meal service used to be fairly straightforward: set out one entree, one dessert, and maybe a salad bar. Today, dining rooms must cater to a student population with increasingly varied and complicated needs and preferences.
According to a 2021 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 6.2 percent of adults in the United States have a food allergy. But that number only reflects medically diagnosed allergies, and doesn’t include all of the restricted diets many younger people follow.
Robert Landolphi, the assistant director of culinary operations at the University of Connecticut, said 20 years ago “you had a handful of peanut and nut allergies, and then we had maybe two people on a gluten-free diet.” Today, he said, more than 10 percent of those on a meal plan have some dietary restriction.
Unlike high school restaurants or cafeterias, college and university dining halls must feed thousands of people and provide breakfast, lunch, dinner, and often late-night snacks. Students may also have no choice but to eat there, as meal plans are often required for those living on campus.
“We are your home, we are where you live, where you eat, where you spend time with your friends,” says Emily Svennevik, a registered dietitian at Vanderbilt University.
Vanderbilt has a cafe where the FDA has banned the top nine allergens, another dining room that’s free of peanuts, tree nuts, and gluten, and an app that allows students with allergies to order custom meals.
Other schools have taken similar steps. But some simply list the ingredients in their dishes, or offer baking with alternatives, such as gluten-free bread and dairy-free yogurt. In general, students with lifestyle-based preferences are referred to existing options, while students with severe allergies submit medical documentation to obtain special accommodations.
How far a meal plan should go to accommodate college students’ diets is a subject of ongoing debate. Robert Nelson, the CEO of the National Association for College and University Food Services, said some dining hall managers argue that it is better for students with allergies to learn how to handle a conventional buffet, as they will have to do once they graduate.
But according to many students, it is not always easy to find adequate choices. That can be tricky when meal plans are mandatory and the average annual cost is $5,023 per student, according to a 2022 report from the Department of Education.
During the first semester of her sophomore year, Maria Bambrick-Santoyo, a Yale University senior who has celiac disease, said there were only six days when she didn’t get sick from what she ate in the dining room.
Students often mixed up serving spoons, increasing the risk of cross-contamination, she said. In such a busy kitchen, it was difficult to guarantee that bits of flour wouldn’t end up in an otherwise gluten-free dish. After several months of emailing college officials, she was allowed to opt out of the meal plan.
“When you prepare food on such a large scale,” she said, “it would be unreasonable for me to expect them to do more than what they already did, which was wipe counters, clean new pots and pans, separating the ingredients.”
Erica Kem, who graduated from the University of Virginia in May, has a long list of allergies: tree nuts, seafood, peanuts, coconut, dairy, eggs, wheat, barley, sesame, beef, mustard, and tomatoes. The last four were not discussed in the allergen-free dining room.
The staff offered to make custom meals for her, but needed to know several hours in advance, and her busy schedule meant she couldn’t always predict when she would eat. She couldn’t just decide to chat with her friends in the dining room without looking at the menu first.
“I should look ahead and say, ‘Would I really like it? Is it worth a potential contamination?’” she said.
If her parents, who live two hours away, hadn’t brought her homemade food on a regular basis, she would have struggled to feed herself, she said.
Chloe Costell, a sophomore at the University of California, Davis, who is vegan, said she often eats dessert for dinner because the cafeteria has run out of vegan entrees. “That was in college when I started to get anemic,” she said.
Several dining room managers and dietitians said they do their best to meet the needs of each student, but acknowledged that it can be difficult and costly to meet all of these needs, especially the less common requests.
At the University of Connecticut, Mr. Landolphi recalled a student who told him that for animal protein, he ate only fish heads, organ meats, and bone broth—and that the dining hall should serve a similar menu, for the sake of student health.
After Mr. Landolphi explained that this would not be possible, “the student agreed to eat fish we brought from Boston and beef from Maine. He adapted to our offer.”
On the campus of California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California, A few students eat only grass-fed meats and organic produce, and expect the dining hall to routinely provide them, says Kaitlin Gibbons, the school’s registered dietitian.
“The reality is we’re not a restaurant,” she said. “We do not serve individuals. We are not short-term cooks. So it makes sense that some students, especially if you follow a limited diet and don’t have enough options, get angry about that.”
Still, many students said they were happy with what was available.
Keira DiGaetano, a recent graduate of Vassar College who is vegan and allergic to sesame and nuts, loved the dining hall’s Greek bowl, which came with tempeh and vegan tzatziki.
Katherine Ng, an up-and-coming sophomore at the University of California, Davis, said she appreciated that the online menu listed the potential allergens in each dish so she could plan ahead. “As a person with a nut allergy, this was kindest to me,” she said.
What is often more difficult for students with allergies is the pressures of the college environment, such as being alone in a new place and wanting to fit in, said Dr. Ruchi Gupta, a professor at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine who studies allergies. in students.
“It’s also the time for college students when you think you’re invincible,” so college students are more likely to take nutritional risks because they want to eat with their peers, she said. “You want to make friends, you don’t want to be different.”
To address some of these issues, two Northwestern students, Kethan Bajaj and Julia Auerbach, last year founded College Advocates for Food Allergy Awareness and Education, an organization that supports people with allergies.
The group has provided on-campus training on how to use an EpiPen and organized discussions among students with allergies. This year, it hopes to work more closely with the Northwestern dining halls — which already have allergen-free stations called Pure Eats — on things like having more safe snacks available on campus and placing toasters for gluten-free bread far away from the other appliances. .
But the group’s ambitions are even greater. Ms. Auerbach and Mr. Bajaj are already in touch with students on several other campuses to set up new chapters. Their ultimate goal is allergen-free stations in every school.
“Colleges as a whole need to do more to support food allergy education and awareness,” said Mr Bajaj. “The overall goal is to spread the club around the world, to give a voice to food allergies.”