Vegetarians and Ohio University's Culinary Services

By Barbara Jaquish and Daniel Lesiczka

Most students are required to live on campus with a meal plan for their first two years at Ohio University. With three active dinning halls, how well does Ohio University cater to the dietary needs of their students, specifically their vegetarian students? Ethan Shultz, freshman fine art major, has been a vegetarian for the past five years and states that he is more satisfied eating in the dinning halls, particularly the one in Jefferson Hall, than he did while living with his parents. However, vegetarian of three years and freshman, Veronica Urbanik has more of a struggle in the dinning hall. She that her needs are not being met due to the limited dinning selection offered to her.

Erin Smolack, a sophomore, is an employee of Shively, OU’s most recent dinning hall. She stated that the student employees have no say in what food is served. They can physically make vegetarian food in the case of the deli, which takes some measures to accommodates vegetarians, such as separating the meat and vegetables while in storage, however gloves are seldom changed after handling meat.

The mission statement of the Ohio University Culinary Services’, found on their webpage, “is to provide the highest quality dining and consumer experience possible for the diverse university community and guests, in support of the educational mission and residential concept of our institution.”

“We have developed a variety of informational icons which are in use at each of our dining halls to share important dietary information at a glance.”

Throughout the dinning halls, on each dish label, there are nutritional icons that convey important dietary information.  For vegetarian student, this acts as a marker indicating which food is guaranteed to be purely vegetarian.

Unfortunately, no dinning hall staff involved with food selection could meet with us due to a last minute cancelation and media policies restricting interviews by most dinning hall managers. It was found out, however, that comment cares left by students are looked over and reported them to the people who select the and order the food served in every dinning hall. Reading comment cards is one of if not, the only ways dinning hall officials are able to listen to the students and take their requests into consideration so that they can better accommodate the growing needs of vegetarian students.

For the past four years, Ohio University has been ranked in the top ten vegan friendly campuses by PETA, placing number fourth in 2011.

Though their alternative dinning options have been highly praised, they are also subject to severe criticism.  Conflict and difference of opinion are inevitable in a diverse community such as OU.  Things to consider: reducing the two year meal plan requirement, introducing more options and maintaining quality food with as much selection as possible are all things that could ease the tension between displeased students and dinning hall options.