Guest Author: Cindy Baur ’16<\/p>\n
Grease soaked vegetables. \u00a0Refried beans.\u00a0 French fries. Mac and cheese.\u00a0 These were the vegetarian options offered in the cafeteria that sparked Pro Veg, a group of students who wanted to improve and expand vegetarian options on campus.\u00a0 The group formed as sort of a sub-movement of the Food Advisory Council, a collection of faculty, Dining Services staff, and students that meets about once a month to discuss Dining Services related topics.<\/p>\n
Originally I was inspired to found Pro Veg by a trip to the Hazon Jewish Food Festival in Philadelphia.\u00a0 At the festival I sat in on talks about Kosher butchering and I found myself considering a more mindful approach to eating meat.\u00a0 Many people at the festival were approaching topics from an activist standpoint and I left feeling encouraged.\u00a0 Dickinson calls itself a sustainable institution and in many ways it is a leader in sustainable initiatives, especially when it comes to food.\u00a0 However, as I reflected upon the food choices available at Dickinson I realized that we could be doing so much more.\u00a0 I felt that Meatless Mondays could be a great option for Dining Services to pursue to reduce Dickinson\u2019s carbon footprint and to encourage others to take a break from meat one day a week.\u00a0 I knew certain groups of students on campus wouldn\u2019t be thrilled, such as athletes, but I felt that with the right approach, students would realize that meatless options can be just as protein-rich as actual meat.<\/p>\n
The first step was to find other students interested in promoting vegetarianism on campus.\u00a0 I started by emailing people I knew would be interested: student farmers, Baird Sustainability Fellows, and members of Asbell Cooking Club (a club that cooks vegetarian meals once a week).\u00a0 I ended up with an email list of 13 people.<\/p>\n
At our first meeting, about five people actually showed up.\u00a0 During our discussion I quickly realized that pursuing Meatless Mondays at Dickinson was going to be a much more difficult task than I had imagined.\u00a0 Students in the group pointed out that Meatless Mondays wouldn\u2019t be well received by the entire student body, especially because it presents vegetarianism as the only moral choice.\u00a0 In other words, if you eat a vegetarian diet, you are a better person. \u00a0As a group we came to the conclusion that it was not our place to force people into certain food choices.<\/p>\n
We decided that starting by making vegetarian options better and more abundant would be a much better approach to starting the process of increasing vegetarianism on campus.\u00a0 Our strategy was to make vegetarian options so available and irresistible that people wouldn\u2019t even realize that they would be skipping out on eating meat.\u00a0 We decided to call ourselves Pro Veg.\u00a0 I timidly brought our ideas to Dining Services.\u00a0 How could I, a senior living off-campus and without a meal plan, have any sway in what is served in the caf?\u00a0 During my first meeting with Errol Huffman, the director of Dining Services, I quickly realized that Dining Services cares a lot about what students want.\u00a0 As Errol told me, they\u2019re in the business of pleasing customers and if their customers want more vegetarian options, they would try to provide that.<\/p>\n
After a few more meetings with Pro Veg members and Dining Services representatives we decided that the best way to capture how Dickinson students feel about current vegetarian options would be through a survey.\u00a0 Errol sent me the four-week menu rotation with every single item served in the caf.\u00a0 Pro Veg members and I designed a survey around the menu, asking students to list their favorite and least favorite options and to use requests for open space to give constructive criticism and to make suggestions for improvement.<\/p>\n
We sent out the survey and received 264 responses.\u00a0 We found that most students surveyed rarely feel like there are enough vegetarian and vegan options in the caf.\u00a0 Students said that they did not think there were enough protein options for a vegetarian and they often still felt hungry after eating a meal.\u00a0 Survey respondents easily pointed out their dissatisfactions with the caf but did not use the open-ended spaces of the survey to give constructive feedback.\u00a0 If you\u2019d like to see all of the responses, click here<\/a> and select responses at the top of the page.<\/p>\n After the survey closed and Pro Veg had a chance to sift through the results, I sat down with Errol and head chef Richie Rice.\u00a0 Both Errol and Richie were receptive of the survey.\u00a0 In fact, Errol had already given Richie the assignment of adding 100 new vegetarian menu items to the menu rotation for the 2016-2017 academic year.<\/p>\n I think the survey taught me that there is no way to please everyone, that there is no perfect solution to any problem and that sometimes people do not have the same interpretation of a problem. The whole Pro Veg process also taught me students have more power on campus than they may realize.\u00a0 Without much effort I was able to come up with an idea, find other students who supported my idea, and meet with Dickinson staff to talk about those ideas and I think that\u2019s pretty damn cool.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Guest Author: Cindy Baur ’16 Grease soaked vegetables. \u00a0Refried beans.\u00a0 French fries. Mac and cheese.\u00a0 These were the vegetarian options offered in the cafeteria that sparked Pro Veg, a group of students who wanted to improve and expand vegetarian options on campus.\u00a0 The group formed as sort of a sub-movement of the Food Advisory Council, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3145,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/foodstudies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/foodstudies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/foodstudies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/foodstudies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3145"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/foodstudies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/foodstudies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/foodstudies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/foodstudies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/foodstudies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}