It’s a typical weekday afternoon. You have a few hours to kill between classes, and heading home seems like a waste of time and money. In your early morning haze, you’ve forgotten to pack a lunch. You end up at the Robarts cafeteria. The stir fry is soggy and gelatinous; the pizza is lukewarm and heavy; the salad is pale brown and limp. Buying a sub could take longer than your commute. The staff range from standoffish to hostile, when they aren’t pointedly ignoring you. You leave $8 poorer, hungry, or both.
You are not alone.
On February 10, UTSU hosted a wide-ranging student forum called I F*ing Hate This School. There were few points of agreement, but a hearty round of applause made one thing clear: if there is anything that U of T students fucking hate, it is the food on campus.
Defend the University College cafeteria if you will, schlep to Wymilwood for a fresh sandwich, or grab a cheap and tasty roti at Diablos. Bring your own tupperware to The Hot Yam, a regular free vegan lunch at the International Student Centre. But when it comes to the central, Aramark cafeterias like those at Robarts, Sid Smith, and Gerstein, no one is a fan. Here at The Varsity, we think it must be possible to build a cafeteria where lunch is easy on both your wallet and your preference for realistically textured food. We set out to find more successful models.
An industry trade mag, somehow delivered to our office, offers few solutions. Well-meaning articles discuss environmental sustainability, but the featured recipe is inexplicably called “Kentucky/Indian Fusion: Hot Brown Entree.” The ads are revealing. A stodgy looking off-brand burger franchise boasts, “students will love our big taste—you’ll love the big profits.” Bear Naked, a line of environmentally-conscious granola recently acquired by Kellogg, promises that students are willing to pay extra for natural products, so you can “grow your sales the all-natural way.”
Maclean’s rates cafeterias across the country, but has yet to publish a really positive review. One of their writers, Nicholas Kohler, has developed a flare for disgusting metaphors, at one point comparing lasagne noodles to cadaver skin. For fresh ideas, we had to look further afield.
With more than 20,000 students, lots of commuters, and a central campus that bleeds into downtown, the University of Edinburgh is not a bad model for U of T. The administration-run cafeterias are horrendous, but the student union manages an extensive parallel service that any Canadian student could envy.
The union occupies no less than four large buildings on campus, each housing an array of pubs, cafes, and restaurants. Alcohol sales subsidize the food, which keeps prices at student level in a city where restaurants are about twice as expensive as Toronto.
The food isn’t perfect, and none of these outlets are more than a five-minute walk from the tastier sandwich shops and cafes that surround campus. But they stay in business, thanks to low prices and great atmosphere. The campus pubs face the stiffest competition, with dozens of cheap and local alternatives just off campus, but still do roaring business on the weekends. Edinburgh’s project is only possible because the university cedes substantial responsibility, and plenty of space, to the student union.
“At Edinburgh the university tends to recognize that students know what students want,” says student union president Adam Ramsay. “Democratically owned student services employing professional managers are a real win, for students and the university.”
While it makes sense that student control can improve campus food, we don’t necessarily have to be in charge. At St Olaf College in Minnesota, where the food is ranked fourth out of 368 colleges by The Princeton Review, a humble bulletin board makes all the difference.
“When you leave our servery we have a big giant cork board with comment cards,” says Peter Abramson, general manager. “We probably get 40 or 50 a day, saying, the oatmeal is too salty, or Jane was mean to me at the green station.” This is a college with only 3,000 students. The staff write responses on the cards and post them for students to read. “There’s a real dialogue that we try to keep up.”
At U of T, some of the residences maintain food committees that give their kitchen staff feedback, but there is no meaningful dialogue between students and Aramark. In any case, it’s tough for subsidiaries of big contractors to respond to requests.
This might be why Aramark and Sodexo, infamous for feeding prison inmates and students around the world, are rarely well-reviewed. (Urbandictionary.com offers some concise criticism.) But not all contracting companies are created equal. St Olaf works with a Bon Appetit, a small catering company that hires chefs with real culinary training, and then gives them some power.
“Somebody like Aramark or Sodexo, they have a book that says, here’s what you’re going to run next week, here’s who you’re going to buy it from, and here’s how you’re going to make it,” says Abrahamson. In contrast, he writes each week’s menu from scratch, after consulting with local suppliers about what is fresh. Bon Appetit sets general guidelines: their schools can’t use MSG, trans fats, or high fructose corn syrup. They must prepare bases like soup stock from scratch.
Bon Appetit has two schools in the top five of Princeton Review’s rankings, but a disproportionate number of successful cafeterias are run by university employees, not outsourced as they are throughout most of U of T. Bowdoin College, in Maine, is run in-house by people who have been with the school for as long as 35 years. Bowdoin employs its own butcher, and bakes from scratch on campus. It has some of the best cafeteria food in the United States.
“The dining hall becomes a social hub for the college, so the administration have continued to support it,” says Michele Gaillard, in charge of the operation. “We have a good budget that allows us to make a big investment in our staff, whereas a lot of colleges have either a very small staff or a not-well-trained staff.”
Great food can build community, and that might be just what U of T needs to integrate disaffected commuters in search of the elusive “student experience.” At the University of British Columbia, Sprouts, a student-run cafe and co-op, is building a movement with 75-cent coffee, soup, and home-baked bread. Heather Russell, who works at the volunteer-run centre, describes the rest of the UBC campus as “a food desert.”
“What we try to create is more of a community than anything,” she says of Sprouts. “It’s about having a place for people to go that’s affordable and has good food if you forget your lunch.”
Sprouts sounds a bit like U of T’s now-defunct Radical Roots, a vegan student co-op that used to serve cheap eats to a packed room every weekday at the International Student Centre. The cafe was suddenly shut down by the administration in the fall of 2006.
“The thing that made Radical Roots really unique was that it was a community,” says Agata Durkalec, who dedicated four years of her life to the project while an undergraduate at U of T. “The lines between the people that went there and the people that worked there were really blurry—we all felt like we were all on the same team. I think that a lot of people really appreciated that, and would not be able to get it in any other student space or any other food service provider on campus now.”
In recent years, the university’s approach to food has been more about building revenue than community. In 2008, cafeterias at U of T lost money. But starting in 2009, according to a report presented to the University Affairs Board last year, that should change. By 2010, the report predicts that 13 per cent of food and beverage revenues will be profit, effectively subsidizing the residences and Hart House. By 2013, ancillary services—parking, residence, and food—are predicted to bring in a profit of $1.3 million for the university. This is a somewhat unusual approach. While Bowdoin makes a profit from its food services, the other universities we surveyed aim to break even feeding their students.
In continental Europe, food is more likely to be subsidized. In Berlin, the state-sponsored Mensa cafeterias dish up veggie-friendly meals on the cheap. Danny Auron, a U of T grad and Osgoode Law student who spent last semester studying in Amsterdam, discovered a similar system.
“They had a cafe called the Atrium that served lunch and dinner at deep discount prices (a big bowl of soup was around 80 cents) and the food was good enough to make it into a ‘cheap eats’ guide book or two on the city,” says Auron. “The school provided a place for good, affordable food right in the middle of campus, and attached it to an area with tons of seating for eating, studying, and meeting.” It may not be fancy, but 80-cent soup beats cadaver skin lasagne any day.
