CHLOE KOWALYK
News Editor
You walk into Willy C’s after a long day of classes to finally get something to eat.
Walking up to the Kiosk, your stomach rumbles.
You order your food, a fruit cup and a sub, and wait the 10 or 15 minutes it takes for your sub to be prepared.
After your order is called, you pick up your bag and head back to your room, stomach still rumbling.
When you make it to your room, you open your bag, and to your dismay, your fruit cup is covered in mold.
That rumbling feeling in your stomach is replaced by a sickening feeling.
Disgusted, you bring your moldy fruit cup back to Willy’s and show the workers your fruit cup.
They give you a new fruit cup to replace the moldy one, but do you really want to eat it?
Unfortunately, this story is completely true — it happened to me just a few weeks ago.
Upon sharing my moldy fruit story with my friends and classmates, I found out they have had similar problems with the food on campus.
One friend told me she found a dead fly in her salad from Blue Devil Grill.
Another told me how the chicken on their wrap didn’t seem to be fully cooked and made them feel sick.
Yet another student found a long, black hair inside of her fruit cup.
We quickly began to realize that this was a common experience for many students on SUNY Fredonia’s campus.
All meal plans, dining halls and catering on campus are organized through the college’s Faculty Student Association.
To gain some further insight into this issue, I decided to interview a student who used to work for FSA, at Willy C’s and Blue Devil Grill about the sanitation and health practices in the dining halls.
“I personally don’t think we had proper training for sanitation and health,” the student, who wishes to remain anonymous, explained.
“For the most part, we were just told to do certain things…” the student continued. “I always tried to keep my station as clean as possible and cleaned everything as best as I could, mostly because I wouldn’t want to be eating food that came from an unclean preparation space, so why would I serve that to someone else?”
The student explained that Student Leaders were supposed to train the other workers, yet much of the time, the students were not trained on how to do anything.
When it comes to spoiled food, the student explained the FSA workers were told to either throw the food away or get a manager to approve the food to be thrown out.
With my fruit cup story mentioned earlier, the workers did just that. They threw away my moldy fruit cup and replaced it with a new one.
Still, simply throwing away my bad product cannot excuse the fact that so many students are experiencing this.
It doesn’t seem plausible that I had simply gotten unlucky with my gross food when so many other students had also gotten “unlucky” as well.
The bad food experiences with FSA don’t only exist in the dining halls.
Abby Tartaro, a fellow student here at SUNY Fredonia, was quarantined in Hendrix Hall last semester for concerns related to COVID-19.
Students like Tartaro that are quarantined on campus have no choice but to have their food delivered to them by FSA employees from the dining halls.
Tartaro explained that she was given two options each day per meal.
While the food being served was properly portioned, included options for those with dietary restrictions and was decently healthy, Tartaro still had some concerns with her quarantine diet.
“Half the time the food was expiring that day and I was too scared to eat it,” she said. “This made me uncomfortable and I had to resort to Instacart in order to get food that I trusted.”
Another student who had to quarantine on campus described his food as being “soggy and mushy and usually cold.”
Not only is the food subpar for both quarantined and not-quarantined students, but the options for dining on campus have been severely limited since the beginning of the pandemic.
Almost all of the cafes on campus, with the exception of Café Mason and FredExpress, have been closed.
Two of the most notable café closures are Sprout Café, which served exclusively vegan options, and Tea Rex, which served boba tea and other breakfast items.
Various students are saddened by this news as they are now very limited in places to use their meal plans.
To get some answers regarding the cafe closures and about the food here on campus in general, I spoke to Darin Schulz, the executive director of FSA.
Schulz explained that there were many reasons several of the cafés on campus closed.
Sprout Café closed prior to COVID-19, as the college was losing money by keeping the café open.
To keep vegan options available on campus, Schulz explained after Sprout closed, the other cafés began serving the vegan options previously available at Sprout.
Schulz further explained that since many students were virtual and not on campus last year, many of the cafés had to close.
According to Schulz, FSA is also understaffed, and they did not have enough labor to keep all of the cafés open and staffed.
For the café in McEwen in particular, Schulz says, “we want to get through this year and look at next year with the hopes of possibly opening it back up.”
In regards to the budget, FSA did not include opening up the McEwen Café when creating the budget last spring, since the vaccines were just beginning to roll out, and no one knew what the next academic year would look like.
However, the budget is not permanent, as Schulz said FSA can “make adjustments as we go forward.”
I also asked Schulz how students with dietary restrictions can navigate their meal plan.
He explained that there are always vegan options available at the dining halls, and there is a guide to avoiding allergens available online, as well as pamphlets for eating vegan and vegetarian at Fredonia.
Regarding the bad food experiences many students have been dealing with, Schulz says he hasn’t been “made aware” of these situations, particularly dead flies in the food.
He explains that every once in a while, a bad product makes its way through from either FSA themselves or their supplier, and that they follow sanitation procedures from the county health department.
Schulz emphasizes that if students find a bad product, they should present it to the manager so they can deal with the situation.
FSA’s severe understaffing is also the reason why the food given to quarantined students was “soggy.”
Schulz said the FSA workers in charge of providing meals to the quarantined students had to head to the dining halls, get the food, walk back over to Hendrix and then deliver the food to the 20-30 students in quarantine, which is why the food ended up becoming soggy and cold.
Schulz says people’s biggest misconception about FSA is that “there is a lack of options.”
He says there are always options for students to eat with restrictions on campus, they simply need to ask. Schulz feels FSA could do a better job of communicating those options to students.
Schulz also says FSA could improve on “the consistency of quality.”
He describes how FSA has been dealing with severe understaffing and relies a lot on students, who can only work a limited amount of hours.
“It’s never something that I thought would be an issue,” Schulz said.
There are also significant issues in the supply chain, and FSA has had to make many alterations to meals.
As we move out of the pandemic, we can only hope for new, positive changes to come of FSA and our food on campus.