Category: Universities

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Canadian universities aim to boost plant-based options on menus in 2024 to meet student demand

Leila Ahouman, CBC News, December 26, 2023

…. Universities across the country are introducing more plant-based food in their dining halls, something institutions say is an ongoing demand from students for more variety and a larger push for more sustainable practices.

At Western, students are the driving force behind the increase in vegan and vegetarian meals. The university set a goal of having a 40 per cent plant-based menu at all dining halls by the new year, but it hit the target — and at some points even surpassed it — this year. A fully vegan outlet will open in 2024, and the school wants to reach a 50 per cent target in 2025.

Colin Porter, director of hospitality services at Western, said when students initially complained about the lack of nutritious and healthy options, the school had to “take responsibility and align with sustainability values.”

Chefs from Ontario universities train to cater to student demands for plant-based foods

The push to have more plant-based menus on campuses is happening across the country. At the University of British Columbia, 55 per cent of the food in dining halls is plant-based, and the Vancouver school hopes to reach a goal of 80 per cent by 2025. Also that year, Concordia University in Montreal plans to reduce its purchase of meat, dairy and eggs by 30 per cent.

Similarly, Dalhousie University in Halifax aims to offer a menu with at least 50 per cent plant-based food options by 2030. And while plant-based options represented less than half of the University of Toronto’s food services offerings two years ago, they now account for 61 per cent.

David Speight, the executive chef and culinary director of food services at UBC, explains how 55 per cent of the university’s menu is plant-based — and what this represents for universities in Canada….

[… Read more at CBC News ]

 

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UC Berkeley commits to having 50% of its entrees be plant-based by 2027

Benita Gingerella, FoodService Director, December 12, 2023

The University of California Berkeley has announced a commitment to have at least 50% of the entrees served in its dining commons be plant-based by 2027.

The school is teaming up with the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) to help them reach their goal.

To kick off of the partnership, UC Berkeley and HSUS hosted a plant-based takeover at Crossroads, the school’s largest dining commons. During the event, students sampled a plant-based Fall Grain Salad Stuffed Acorn Squash and provided their thoughts on the menu item. They also shared their feedback on what they would like to see on menus going forward.

Over the next several semesters, HSUS will also be offering a variety of culinary trainings, marketing and other resources to aid UC Berkeley as it makes the transition.

“We’re excited to join this initiative and showcase our plant-based options,” said Christopher R. Henning, executive director for Berkeley Dining, in a statement. “Berkeley Dining has a strong commitment to offering our students healthy and nutritious plant-based options, as well as engaging with our students in the process.”

UC Berkeley is the first school in the University of California system to partner with HSUS and commit to serving more plant-based items on campus.

Many other colleges and foodservice providers have also partnered with HSUS in the past. Penn State is currently working with the organization to make 35% of its entrees served on campus be plant-based by 2025. Elior, Aramark, Sodexo and Whitsons Culinary Group have all partnered with HSUS to expand their plant-based options.

[… Read more at FoodService Director ]

 

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Hundreds of academics call for 100% plant-based meals at UK universities

Damian Carrington, The Guardian, Sept. 4, 2023

fight the climate crisis, saying that the institutions have “for centuries, been shining lights of intellectual, moral, and scientific progress”.

The open letter, organised by the student-led Plant-Based Universities campaign, likened the move to meat-free food to the fossil fuel divestment to which 101 UK universities have already committed.

Cutting meat consumption in rich nations is vital to tackling the climate crisis, with scientists saying it is the single biggest way for people to reduce their impact on the planet.

The letter, sent to UK university vice-chancellors, catering managers, and student union presidents, said: “We are acutely aware – as you must be too – of the climate and ecological crises; not only this but we are also mindful that animal farming and fishing are leading drivers of them.

“Most universities have declared a climate emergency, with many taking steps such as fossil fuel divestment. [Students] deserve to know that their universities are actively working to create a future for them to graduate into.”….

The Plant-Based Universities campaign is active in more than 50 universities. To date, the student unions’ at Birmingham, University College London, Stirling, and Queen Mary universities have voted to phase in 100% plant-based menus.

Related votes also have passed at Cambridge, Kent and London Metropolitan universities. Votes at Edinburgh and Warwick universities did not pass. The University of Cambridge removed beef and lamb from the menus of its 14 catering outlets in 2016, “dramatically reducing food-related carbon emissions”.

Chris Packham said: “The student campaigners of Plant-Based Universities are making incredible changes in their institutions and it’s only right to see hundreds of academics stepping up to support them.”

In 2020, A powerful coalition of the UK’s health professions said the climate crisis could not be solved without action to cut the consumption of high-emission food such as red meat, and that sustainable diets were healthier.

Public sector caterers serving billions of meals a year in schools, universities, hospitals and care homes also pledged in 2020 to cut the amount of meat they serve by 20%. In 2021, a government-commissioned national food strategyrecommended cutting meat consumption by nearly a third.

[… Read more at The Guardian]

 

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These 2 College Cafés Just Made Oat Milk the Default

Dairy is no longer the default at these on-campus cafés, following a larger oat milk trend at coffee chains such as Blue Bottle and Stumptown.

Jamie Evan Bichelman, VegNews, April 25, 2023
Gen Z is leading a transcendent shift in plant-based food consumption. This is particularly evident in the plant-based milk category where the demographic consumes five times more than any prior generation. This means that in college, Zoomers are reaching for anything but cow’s milk for their coffee. So how are campuses keeping up?

At the University of San Diego, award-winning coffeehouse Aromas is now the first known on-campus café in the country to offer oat milk by default.

“The ‘Oat Milk Initiative’ was one of the winning ideas from the 2021 Changemaker Challenge, a social innovation competition focused on ways to make our campus more sustainable and inclusive,” Juan Carlos Rivas, PhD, Director of Social Change and Student Engagement for the Changemaker HUB at USD, tells VegNews…

[… Read more at VegNews]

 

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What To Consider When Asking Institutions To Shift How They Serve Food

A guest blog from Greener By Default explores and explains the process of getting institutions to consider menu changes and plant-based defaults.

Sarah Thorson & Ilana Braverman , Faunalytics, May 10, 2023

 

Food choices are extremely personal. They’re informed by our culture, upbringing, education, ethics, and more. For some, food serves as a time capsule keeping familial and cultural history alive, while for others it’s an outward expression of morals and values. Food choices can also be restricted by bodily responses, religious affiliation, and financial realities. And when we work to shift food norms, all of these considerations have to be taken into account to realize widespread change.

For animal advocates working to shift food norms, it can be tempting to ask for the elimination of meat and dairy from menus and diets, since we want to improve the lives of all living beings. But human behavior is complex, and people may respond negatively to a drastic change which they feel is forced upon them. And, with meat consumption still on the rise in the US, psychological research shows that appeals to reduce meat consumption have stronger and longer lasting impacts on eating behaviors than appeals to eliminate meat consumption completely. Serving plant-based meals by default works to accomplish both: preserving freedom of choice, while nudging consumers towards sparing the lives of many animals and lessening food’s overall impact on the environment.

Fostering Inclusivity In Foodservice

Greener by Default (GBD) consults with institutions, including universities, conferences, hospitals, and corporate cafeterias, to serve plant-based meals by default. The default is the option an individual ends up with when they don’t make an active choice. For example, every iPhone user is familiar with the brand’s default ringtone, which most of us don’t bother to change. People tend to stick with defaults partly because it’s one less decision to make, and partly because defaults are often seen as the more socially acceptable option. Because of this tendency, defaults and other behavioral nudges can be used to encourage particular food choices; research shows that implementing plant-based defaults can decrease meat consumption by 53% to 87%, depending on the environment.

With help from GBD, LinkedIn San Francisco was able to switch their menus to serve 65% veg options in the cafeteria and make oat milk the default choice for milk-based drinks in their coffee bar. GBD was also instrumental in helping NYC Health and Hospitals transition their patient meals to serve plant-based meals by default, resulting in over half of eligible patients now choosing plant-based meals. This approach leads to more plant-based options being selected, thus saving many animal lives, while also shifting food paradigms by normalizing plant-based eating. Best of all, because freedom of choice is preserved and there are still meat options available for those who want or feel they need meat at every meal, this approach does not encounter the same type of pushback as fully meatless menus….

[… Read more at Faunalytics]

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Let’s make plant-based foods the default on campus

A ‘default veg’ position on campus food is one way that universities can respond to the climate crisis.

Kathleen Kevany, University Affairs, Oct. 13, 2022

What can universities do to respond to the climate crisis? Our most obvious contributions may come from research and teaching across a range of disciplines: from ecology to the environmental humanities, from engineering to economics and beyond, scholars working in labs and classrooms are trying to mitigate the complex, urgent issues we face.

Yet universities are also much more than engines of research and education. They are societies in themselves, as well as cultural and economic drivers for the broader communities in which they are embedded. The contributions that the students, staff, and faculty who are gathered in universities can offer – and the leadership they can provide – come from many directions.

One critical change that is relatively accessible and affordable and more importantly, more equitable, is to adopt a “default veg” practice. This means changing the current practice of emphasizing meat dishes, to placing the spotlight on plant-based foods on our campuses, while still enabling the full range of dietary choices to be met.

Fulfilling our responsibilities to lead change

We know we need more sustainable food habits. The famous EAT-Lancet report demonstrated that largely plant-based, sustainable diets protect human health and our environments. We are enjoined to “eat local,” to cut food waste, and perhaps above all, to reduce our consumption of meat. The most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change offered yet more evidence that animal agriculture is among the top contributors to our environmental crisis. Deforestation, soil degradation, habitat and biodiversity loss, animal emissions and waste all compound to make animal agriculture a driving force in global warming, just behind fossil fuel consumption. Even as we seek to limit our use of environmentally destructive fuels to fight climate change, so too must we rebalance our diets.

We also know that universities can be leaders when it comes to sustainability. I teach at Dalhousie University, where signature research clusters are grounded in  the United Nation’s Sustainability Development Goals. Over 30 years ago, Dalhousie hosted a gathering of university leaders who committed to the Halifax Declaration. Echoing an earlier agreement signed in Talloires, France by university leaders from around the world, the agreement made at Dalhousie in 1991 espoused concrete goals and lofty aspirations to direct teaching, research, outreach, and operations toward an equitable and sustainable future. Both declarations affirmed not just the risks to our planet’s integrity but also the urgent responsibilities of universities to lead change….

[… Read more at University Affairs ]

 

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Universities should lead on the plant-based dietary transition

Jochen Krattenmacher, Paula Casal, Jan Dutkiewicz, Elise Huchard, Edel Sanders, Nicolas Treich, et al., The Lancet, May 2023

As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the EAT–Lancet Commission have pointed out in recent reports, substantial reductions in demand for animal-based foods are vital for achieving climate targets and for keeping food production within planetary limits. One might expect universities to heed such findings and adjust their food procurement accordingly, especially since they contributed to the research on which these reports are based. However, one only needs to visit a typical university canteen to find that this is not the case. This routine observation is confirmed by studies that have found animal-based food to contribute disproportionately to the environmental footprint of universities compared with plant-based food, and substantially so.
Even when leaving aside the contribution of animal-based food production to climate change, the case for shifting to alternatives, mostly plant-based foods, remains strong. Although impacts differ between different animal products, most economically significant animal-based food production contributes disproportionately to multiple, often all, of the following predicaments: the degradation and overexploitation of ecosystems, misallocation of water and land, risk of pandemics, air and water pollution, and animal suffering. These are all issues that, we the authors assume, most academics and students do not want to contribute to unnecessarily. By procuring different kinds of foods, universities could achieve reductions in many of these negative effects. By doing so, universities could even save money. They also might promote healthier diets among their students and personnel, especially if they emphasise the healthiest kinds of plant-based foods….
[… Read more at The Lancet]

 

 

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How Campus Cafeterias Became Hotspots for Climate Action

Jack McGovan, Sentient Media, May 2, 2023

When Guherbar Gorgulu arrived to study at Erasmus University Rotterdam, she was surprised by the many plant-based options.

“In Turkey, you don’t really have a lot of vegan options,” she says, not to mention many people interested in talking about the impact of what they eat. “I really didn’t have a community of people who also cared about animal rights and the environment.”

That all changed when Gorgulu started attending weekly vegan cooking workshops hosted by the Erasmus Sustainability Hub — a student-led organization encouraging students to lead more sustainable lifestyles. Inspired to join the Hub as Food and Agriculture Manager, Gorgulu, along with her colleagues, have been active in fighting for climate action on campus. Initiatives include workshops, discussions and petitions to demand fully plant-based cafeterias.

The work seems to be paying off. In February, the university announced that they are aiming to make plant-based foods the norm on campus by 2030. The goal is part of the university’s climate commitments; animal agriculture is responsible for around 20 percent of global emissions, and is also a leading cause of habitat loss.

Change is happening beyond Rotterdam. A dozen universities across the U.S. joined an incubator program this year to provide more plant-based foods on their campuses, and across the UK, student unions in Cambridge, Stirling, Birmingham and London voted in support of vegan menus this academic year. In 2021, universities across the entire city of Berlin went predominantly meat-free….

[… Read more at Sentient Media]

 

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Chefs from Ontario universities train to cater to student demands for plant-based foods

At Western in London, for instance, 40% of student residence menus will be plant based by January

Michelle Both, CBC News, May 4, 2023

That’s what chefs from Ontario universities did when they gathered at Western’s Saugeen-Maitland residence this week in London for a culinary training program aimed at ramping up plant-based choices at student residences.

Instead of the standard pulled pork, for instance, sandwiches with shreds of soy-ginger jackfruit — a tropical tree fruit that, if prepared just right, tastes like pulled pork — were among the menu offerings as the get-together wrapped up with a catered lunch.

Twenty-four chefs took part in Humane Society International’s Food Forward program, to explore and experiment with vegan cooking, on Tuesday and Wednesday. Other participating schools included the University of Guelph, University of Windsor and Hamilton’s McMaster University.

The food is getting rave reviews.

Glenn Dupont, a chef at Western’s Elgin Hall residence, said he was never a big fan of chickpeas, but that all changed when he made chickpea and walnut sliders during the training.

“I really would actually make this for myself and my family,” said Dupont, who typically sticks to meat and potatoes at home. “It tastes absolutely excellent.”…

[… Read more at CBC News]

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Cambridge University students vote for completely vegan menus

Union will hold talks with catering services about removing all animal products from cafes and canteens

Nadeem Badshah, The Guardian, Feb. 21, 2023

Students at the University of Cambridge have voted to support a transition to a solely vegan menu across its catering services.

The Cambridge students’ union voted on Monday to hold talks about removing all animal products from its cafes and canteens with the university’s catering services….

William Smith, 24, from the Cambridge branch of the Plant-Based Universities campaign, said: “It’s great that Cambridge students’ union has passed our motion to work with the university to implement a just and sustainable plant-based catering system.

“By removing animal products from its menus, the university could significantly reduce its environmental impact and showcase to the world its commitment to sustainability….

[… Read more at The Guardian]

 

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