Many times a week — amidst the noisy chatter of students, the rows of golden muffins on display, the beeps of the cashier and music thumping from my earphones into my right ear — I stand in line at an on-campus café. Some days, you could find me in loitering on the sidelines at Libe, perusing the soups in Mattins or snatching a sandwich from Sage for lunch; but with each time, I grew more and more familiar with a puzzling case: the mystery of nutritional information for the food I am constantly buying.
Cornell often ranks as one of the nation’s best universities for dining. While this may be true for food prepared in the kitchen and served at the dining halls, a closer look at on-campus food options, their respective ingredients and the lack of transparency and availability around nutritional information seem to suggest a story that strays from Cornell Dining’s commitment to “high-quality foods that are healthy and creatively prepared with genuine care for a diverse community.” When it comes to food choices beyond the dining halls — such as the pre-made meals or snacks hastily grabbed on a sleepy morning or in between the bustle to classes — what are we truly getting? Does Cornell Dining really “nourish the future” or do these promises ring hollow?
Cornell University boasts various on-campus dining for students to buy meals throughout the day; from the wraps at Mattin’s in Duffield Hall to the salads from Café Jennie’s in Mann Library, hungry Cornellians — myself included — wait in lines for breakfast, lunch or an afternoon munch almost every day of the week. During my underclassman years, I paid little attention to nutrition and the food I was consuming; instead, I placed my trust in Cornell Dining and assumed that all on-campus foods had to be relatively healthy. In my second year living off-campus, however, I am forced to make more conscious decisions about food and notice how obscure nutritional information for the very sandwiches I would be consuming weekly is. Excluding a few scattered QR codes above the soup options, the ingredients or calorie counts for menu choices are not physically displayed or easily accessible online.
Perhaps I’d be more comfortable about this lack of transparency if the ingredients in these food options were nutritious, natural and found in the regular kitchen. Unfortunately, such is not the case. A scrutinizing plunge into NetNutrition, Cornell Dining’s online catalog of nutritional information for just some of the on-campus dining options, reveals that many of the meals and food sold are not as healthy as they are branded, but rather are tainted with artificial flavoring,
One startling discovery unveils the concerning content of the classic Just Egg breakfast sandwich sold at Crossings Café. The sandwich is loaded with ingredients many students might not expect to find in a simple morning meal; it includes eight ingredients that are banned from Whole Foods Market, which include high fructose corn syrup — a sweetener associated with obesity — calcium propionate and artificial flavors.
If a student wants to start the day off with a blueberry muffin instead, they would be charging their bodies with four banned ingredients from Whole Foods, a plethora of artificial flavors and 43 grams of sugar — which drastically exceeds the recommended amount for both men and women per day.
Lunch does not seem too promising either: a Mediterranean Power Bowl, sold at various locations through Cornell Dining’s go-to “Take Us Home” meals, falls victim to a similar trend; this time, six Whole Foods-banned ingredients lurk in the lengthy list of ingredients. Coincidentally, these very ingredients are nowhere to be found on the physical bowl itself; instead, the list of ingredients printed on the bowl’s label fabricates a guise of health and freshness under the words “chicken,” “quinoa,” “zucchini” and other produce. Ingredients such as sodium benzoate, TBHQ tertiary butylhydroquinone or the lemon juice from concentrate are hidden from the unassuming public.
Surely, however, a freshly made sandwich would be healthier! While this could be the case anywhere else, a Panko chicken sandwich from Atrium Café in Sage Hall is tainted with six banned ingredients, artificial and chemical additives and preservatives — such as modified food starch and soy lecithin. Even a seemingly innocent afternoon cookie — say, the large triple chocolate chip cookie — seems to have been made in factories instead of kitchens; with artificial vanilla flavor, monoglycerides, artificial coloring and preservatives. These industrial delights are leagues away from being “homemade”.
Like Cornell, Yale University is another fellow Ivy League listed as one of the best campuses in the country for dining. Yet despite sharing this reputation, Cornell sulks behind Yale in terms of nutrition and transparency. In Yale’s dining halls and other dining locations, nutritional details are displayed above each food item or online through a QR code, easily informing and helping students in their food choices; in fact, when Yale digitized all nutritional labels in October, a reality Cornellians currently live in, the switch furrowed many brows and summoned exasperated sighs from the student body — a testament to the convenience and preference for publicly accessible nutritional information over online ones. Despite this recent change, however, Yale still leads in terms of transparency; Yale’s Hospitality app allows students to access such information with just a few swipes and taps on their phone screens — a luxury Cornell’s website NetNutrition does not provide. NetNutrition also offers an incomplete listing of on-campus locations, specifically lacking those that are independent from Cornell Dining, such as Macs and Terrace in Statler Hall — the two busiest lunch spots all year round. For both options, students are left utterly clueless about the contents of their meals, as nutritional information is not provided in-person nor online. Cornell, therefore, should take a University-wide initiative to increase transparency at all eateries.
Even in food quality, Yale Dining seems to be more dedicated to the mission of “nourishing the future;” for example, Yale’s chocolate chip cookies are extremely similar to a “homemade” recipe and are devoid of artificial flavors, preservatives and additives.
In hopes of receiving answers, I reached out to Cornell Dining. Disappointingly, however, my interview questions lingered unaddressed in their brief, two-paragraph response. Simple questions inquiring about the process of designing meals and evaluating their nutritional content — information that should in no way be secretive — were unanswered. When asked about what steps Cornell Dining will take to address the usage of banned ingredients and chemical additives, Dining made no comment; instead, they insisted that they were “committed to creating menus that support students’ diverse nutritional needs and preferences” — a statement that now no longer proves true. When asked if students could expect future changes to increase accessibility to nutritional information, all that was provided was a hyperlink to NetNutrition. Their response dodged questions about on-campus dining options, but rather assured that the “menus in Residential Dining units follow a set criteria of Menu Standards that are informed by the 2020-2025 USDA Dietary Guidelines for Americans and our Eating Well with Cornell Dining principles” — a complete stray from the primary concern at hand.
I cannot help but think that perhaps the lack of transparency surrounding Cornell’s on-campus foods’ nutritional information is intentional to shroud the chemical, artificial truth about the meals and snacks we are consuming. Without nutritional labels or a thorough ingredients list readily available at on-campus locations, students lack the ability to make informed choices about what they are putting inside their bodies. Riddled with chemical preservatives such as sodium benzoate, artificial flavors and ingredients that cannot be found at home, how can these food options be beneficial to students? How can Cornell Dining claim its commitment to high-quality foods and more importantly, are students’ health and wellness actually prioritized?
Perhaps most disturbingly, however, is that even when these questions are brought to Cornell Dining, they still remain unanswered. The mediocre responses — or rather, the lack of — are devoid of any possibility of improvement, concession, acknowledgement or reassurance towards us students. The hypocrisy of the University proclaiming its ambitions of fueling “the future” without any reform within Dining is heinously obvious and deeply disheartening.
Cornell’s failure to nourish students honestly and properly does not only apply to physical health, but also transcends into mental health, as well. In a high-stress environment with intense academic demands and biweekly bombardments of prelims, studies have demonstrated how nutrition plays a crucial — yet severely overlooked — role in cognitive function, mood and concentration. Anxiety, stress and depression are inflated with the increased intake of processed and sugary foods — the very foods that are provided to us on-campus. At a university where 42.1 percent of the student population has or is suffering from depression (as of 2019), the least the University could do is offer nutritious options for the countless students who are forced to stake out on campus to tackle lurking deadlines and taxing courses.
Beyond mental and physical health, however, eating on-campus is also a simple matter of convenience; with classes, club meetings and jobs all scattered across Cornell’s large campus, not everyone has the time to sit down in a dining hall or walk back home for three meals a day. Many Cornellians, myself included, rely on faster, portable options at campus cafes or stores. Armed with the disconcerting truths about some of these options, however, leave students such as myself cruelly stranded at a stalemate: do we choose our health or sacrifice time — perhaps the hour we had previously allotted to catch up on homework, study for a prelim or even take a nap after a sleepless night?
While Cornell Dining needs to offer healthier foods, perhaps the first small adjustment towards that big leap can simply be increased transparency. Cornell should follow Yale’s footsteps and display more QR codes or physical nutritional information. Not only will this small change help students choose healthier options without extra research or an unnecessary guessing game in the middle of the line, but it might also increase the push to more natural, “homemade” ingredients. Perhaps only then will Cornell Dining be able to truly pursue its mission, and proudly say that they are indeed providing healthy meals for the Cornell community.
Transparency is not a privilege. Transparency is a necessity in everyday lives; for a University that insists upon caring for students’ futures, no one should be left guessing what is on — or rather, in — their plate.
Below is the response from Michelle Nardi, Registered Dietitian Nutritionist with Cornell Dining:
“Cornell Dining is committed to creating menus that support students’ diverse nutritional needs and preferences. Our menus in Residential Dining units follow a set criteria of Menu Standards that are informed by the 2020-2025 USDA Dietary Guidelines for Americans and our Eating Well with Cornell Dining principles. While we strive to offer many healthy options, we also recognize the importance of providing a range of choices to meet different tastes and dietary needs and preferences.
“The nutrition and ingredient information for many of Cornell Dining’s retail items can be found online at https://netnutrition.dining.cornell.edu/NetNutrition/1. Students with specific questions or medically diagnosed dietary restrictions are encouraged to reach out to the Cornell Dining Nutrition team at [email protected]. Additionally, students who are interested in participating in relevant initiatives are also encouraged to join the Student Assembly Dining Committee to work directly with the Cornell Dining Leadership team.”
Serin Koh is a fourth year student in the College of Arts and Sciences. Her fortnightly column And That’s the Skoop explores student, academic and social culture, as well as national issues, at Cornell. She can be reached at [email protected].
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