I am a resident student at a college and a few months ago I decided to go vegan. I won’t talk about the environmental and health-related advantages of going vegan (although there are many), but I mainly made this decision because I am lactose intolerant and was having issues digesting dairy and meat products. So although I knew coming into it that this would be a difficult decision, I didn’t have much of a choice.
Being a resident student, there is only one kitchen in my entire building, so I have a dining hall at which I eat most of my meals. I really have to rely on my dining hall because otherwise I have to spend actual money on food (which I don’t have a lot of as a college student) or just go without eating. There’s really no way around that. And that is why I get so frustrated with my school’s cafeteria.
The main problem is that things aren’t always labeled correctly, and sometimes they’re not labeled at all. So anything I eat puts me at risk of getting sick because of my lactose intolerance. And even if I wasn’t lactose intolerant, as a vegan, eating meat or dairy would make me sick anyway since my body isn’t used to digesting them. So, in my own dining hall at least, I’m pretty much always at risk of eating dairy products because foods are cross-contaminated or just not labeled.
Another problem is the lack of options. As a vegan, I can eat so many things. There are literally millions of combinations of foods that only contain plant-based products, but at least 75% of the things in my school’s cafeteria contain either meat or dairy, so I find myself eating the same four or five meals all the time. And I go to a school that’s on the more accommodating side, so the majority of colleges probably have way fewer options than even mine does.
Everyone deserves to be able to eat things that don’t make them sick, or to be able to fight for causes they believe in (such as fair labor — a cause that the vegan community promotes!) via the food they’re eating, so I urge colleges to be more accommodating to people with dietary needs.
