Updated: Nov. 5, 2019 at 12:21 p.m.
Dining officials are holding focus groups this week to solicit feedback from students about campus dining options.
Students can sign up for one of two 45-minute focus groups, led by representatives from the dining company Brailsford and Dunlavey, Inc., in the Marvin Center Wednesday to discuss food availability on campus, an email sent to students last week states. Cissy Petty, the vice president of student affairs and the dean of students, said the focus groups are intended to “maximize” students’ involvement in the “housing and dining master plan” – a short-, medium- and long-term plan to address dining options.
“The outcomes of this process may include meal plan restructuring, dining facility upgrades and enhanced dining offerings that can potentially be phased into implementation as early as fall 2020,” Petty said in an email.
Students will receive free lunch or dinner for participating in the focus groups, the email states.
Dining affordability has become a prominent campus issue since officials shut down the J Street dining hall in 2016 and switched to an open dining plan in 2016. A report released last year found nearly 40 percent of the student population faces food insecurity.
In interviews with more than 30 students, 23 said they would sign up for a focus group to tell officials they have trouble finding healthy and affordable meals on campus.
Sophomore Emmah Evangelista said she’d like to have access to a dining hall on the Foggy Bottom Campus because restaurants on GWorld are expensive, which can keep students from accessing sufficient food.
“I don’t think all dining options are very accessible for all students here,” she said. “They’re very expensive.”
Alex La Roche, a junior living in Mitchell Hall, which has communal kitchens on most of its floors, said he would be interested in signing up for a focus group to inform officials that he has trouble finding affordable and healthy food on campus. La Roche said cooking at home is an easier and healthier option to only eating at restaurants, but he has trouble finding healthy food at GWorld vendors.
“If you don’t have a good kitchen or a good setup, like I do right now in Mitchell, it’s hard to fend for yourself,” he said. “You become reliant upon restaurants which are both pricey and not entirely healthy, which takes away a lot of your individual freedom in that regard.”
Freshman Timur Murillo said he’s satisfied with the dining options on campus, but his GWorld budget will likely not last him through the semester because restaurants that accept GWorld are too pricey. He said he can only afford to eat two meals a day if he wants to stay on budget.
“New food places were interesting and whatnot but I started to see it’s very expensive to afford that type of dining,” he said. “For two weeks it was cool because you were shocked by all the opportunities you could have to eat, then you realized how expensive and unsustainable it was to eat and support that lifestyle.”
Freshman Zach Catalano said he eats mostly at the least expensive places on GWorld, like GW Deli and Carvings, because he spent too much GWorld money at the beginning of the semester.
“I started off interested in all the different places to eat, but then I realized the bill, and I was over budget, so I started finding the best deals around – the cheapest food,” he said.
Freshman Vishali Muthuvinayagam said she struggles to balance eating healthy and sticking to a budget because she doesn’t have a kitchen in his residence hall room to cook healthy meals. Muthuvinayagam said she prioritizes healthy eating, but the healthiest dining choices are often the most expensive.
Muthuvinayagam said she still prefers the open dining plan over a dining hall because the current dining plan gives her more options for meals instead of being limited to food served at a dining hall.
“A lot of freshmen don’t know about the dining options, all the food on GWorld,” she said. “It would be nice to have a map to see where everything is, because there’s just this alphabetized list, and you don’t want to go through all of it.”
This post was updated to correct the following:
The Hatchet incorrectly reported Vishali Muthuvinayagam’s pronouns. It is now correct. We regret this error.
