Over the past two years, I’ve compartmentalized nine campus food facilities that offer substantial stand-alone meals, barring places like Starbucks or Sweets and Treats, which provide edible portions akin to snacks or midday bites — though their strongly caffeinated drinks often kill the need to eat.
The main nine are comprised of Pomodoro’s, WoW, Hissho Sushi, Atrium Brew, SubConnection, Element 93, Hugo’s Fresh Nest, Yadi’s Empanadas and The Roost, which I include due to their recent menu incorporation of various soups, Smash Burgers and Oodles Noodle Bowls — all good, hearty meals. Pooled together, the campus eateries form a body separate from the dining hall, an entirely different topic in and of itself and something I’ll save on the plate for later. Overall, the food options offered are plentiful, but variety is the farthest it could possibly be from inclusive.
As a vegetarian, I do not have diverse pickings from campus food facilities. While there are multiple meat options for individuals who do consume meat if they want to try different variations or even if their order gets canceled, those options aren’t available to me or others who share my diet.
In WoW alone, the salads — a meal that has traditionally been made or left for me at countless family functions — all contain some form of meat, which is shockingly and annoyingly unremovable from the meal. There is an entire food section in WoW devoted to wings but their sandwich plus combo menu cannot even offer a single meat-free sandwich. The hungry gap between meat variations and vegetarian nonexistence is blatantly wide and begs for additional options — even if just in the form of a WoW salad with customizable protein choices.
Even more vegetable-oriented places like Hissho Sushi have their issues. Their complete combo menu offers no options for vegetarians, and they only make a single type of maki roll without fish.
Some may argue that places like Hugo’s Fresh Nest and Pomodoro’s Pizza are more responsible for catering to a vegetarian dietary audience, and facilities like WoW should focus on their specialties, in this case: wings. However, the issue is not just in the wings, but the lack of options in various campus menus which, ideally, should cater to every student who wishes to eat from them.
Menus have changed drastically since my freshman year. Incoming vegetarians may not know of the options that came before them, and it would be remiss of me to not explain how those changes have affected the campus food environment today. Krishna Kitchen, a beloved haunt of mine and many more, presented a valuable, innovative, delicious, completely vegetarian menu. If I had the choice to eat from one place for the rest of my semesters at New Paltz, I would’ve picked Krishna. Since nobody could control the outcome of that fiasco, I focus on the options that we could’ve kept but didn’t.
Element 93 once served a black bean burger I regularly bought during my entire sophomore year. It was a refreshing second choice to the beyond-meat burger, which can be frightfully dry and lacking in complementary ingredients. This particular burger was necessary and loved by more than just vegetarians, but I have no idea where it went. Losing food sources such as Krishna’s and the black bean burger adds to the mountain of limitations that people like me face when needing to eat.
Throughout the week, vegetarians experience limited accessibility to campus food, unlike most student consumers. While I often eat at different places during the school week, my options are confined to meals like mac and cheese, (served as a side and not a full portion) smoothies, salads, cheese and vegetable pizza, burrito bowls, wraps and a single kind of veggie roll at Hissho. Half of these meals are served as a solitary option with no other forms at all. Some meals, such as the Yadi’s burrito bowl and its neighboring empanadas, I do not eat anymore due to a poor handling of meat and the discouraging price difference between real and fake meat. These careless and cumbersome processes regarding meat and non-meat options on campus paint an inhibitory idea of its integral nourishment to the student body.
An additional layer of restriction exists during the weekend, when only Pomodoro’s, WoW and Nester’s are the three open places in the SUB — presenting a trilemma of choices. WoW’s wrap exists in only one form for non-meat consumers, and Pomodoro’s vegetable pizza comes at a higher price than cheese pizza, therefore in the later parts of the semester, one would have to buy the cheese pizza due to lower dining dollars. Pasta can be repeated but isn’t wildly disparate in ingredients.
If the weekend SUB options become too scanty or unappetizing, I’d normally trek to Perry’s — though this trip presents alternate problems. The dining hall may offer a whole banquet’s worth of options to everyone, but the level of frequency at which they can eat there is limited to their type of meal plan — if they have one at all. Commuting vegetarian students may not be able to access Perry’s food as easily as resident students do. The two issues I grapple with are the lack of dietary diversity and accessibility, and with my current meal plan being different from my freshman meal plan, I can’t go to Perry’s every weekend night.
To relegate a certain dietary lifestyle to food-specialized places like a salad bar or a pizza section would be to restrict their eatable foods to only a small chunk of their overall diet — and who would want to eat only pizza and salad for the entire school year?
I could subsist off Hugo’s salads, Hissho’s one veggie roll, Yadi’s small beans and rice side dish or even the depressing assortments of leafy greens available at Element 93, but those meals become sickening after excessive repetition and their portions are not always filling. Some of their prices can be difficult to maintain for a full semester’s worth of dining dollars and frustratingly, not even available on the weekend.
While these constraints are challenging to me and my meat-free diet, an even bigger food problem exists for individuals who participate in vegan or gluten-free diets and are exempt from significantly more campus food facilities. I am unsure of how vegans sustainably eat on this campus, given that their options are less than half of mine. This is an extremely worrying matter as it could prevent students of that diet from obtaining nutritious, substantial meals on campus, forcing them to find options elsewhere. Gluten-free options are more accessible, but they still belong to the minor category of stricter diets.
Cultivated culinary attention should be aimed towards people who have a selective diet and limited funds with which to sustain it, and I do not just mean serving the perfunctory avocado-cucumber roll or the beyond-meat burger. Those meals present the bare minimum of vegetarian, vegan or gluten-free enrichment, and the bare minimum is simply not enough. It should not be a huge ask to have dietary diversity for people who are in dire need of it — it’s highly problematic that this could be seen as an ask at all.
Diverse food options are integral for providing the vegetarian students of New Paltz with healthy, accessible and enjoyable meals — but with the skimpiest options possible, they have to settle for the lesser meal and not a very varied one, at that. Food accessibility is a fundamental right given to all kinds of campus consumers, and it should not exclude people like me from that body.
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