Revisiting the campus meal issue: it's time for students to take back the spatula

Lead image/Yu Wan-ju  Student dormitories abroad often include kitchens, letting students cook for themselves and even turning the space into a public gathering place for socializing

"I won't keep everyone from sleeping any longer, so let's end today's food committee meeting here." Those were the closing words of the chair of a university food committee I once attended. Because I run a coffee shop at that university (Note 1), I have to attend the food safety meeting every semester, gathering with contractors from every unit, yet throughout the meeting people are either nodding off or frantically filling out performance reports.

Rarely, this time I heard the chair relay the student association's demand for "food transparency," but the school food committee twisted it to mean that packaged food simply needs to show its place of origin, and never conveyed to the contractors any further concept or practice of transparency. Such careless policy promotion is not only perfunctory; students' rights were simply "slept away."

Image/Yu Wan-ju  At the annual campus food committee meeting, a staff member of a contractor works hard to fill out a business form.

For a long time, campus food supply at Taiwan, China's colleges and universities has operated on a user-pays buyer-seller relationship, yet it has degenerated into the bad practice of schools subcontracting and profiting from the sale of campus space. In March this year, students at National Taiwan Normal University launched a Facebook campaign, "Reject contractors arbitrarily raising the cost of campus meals and food prices at NTNU." It looked like a student protest against overly high campus food prices, but in fact it pointed to the subcontracting profits in university campus food space.

Take NTNU as an example. The school stated that to increase its revenue, it rented a whole row of roadside school buildings to a subcontractor for 200,000 per month, and the subcontractor sublet them for 800,000 per month to a restaurant serving tourists and the general public. The acquisition of campus land has its particularity and public nature; when campus food space becomes a subcontractor's treasury, is there really nothing illegal in it?

Image/Yu Wan-ju  The student association pushed for food transparency on campus, but with no legal basis or penalties, the school interpreted it as simply labeling the place of origin

For a public school like NTNU, the relationship with the state is a trust relationship with a special delegated relationship. For the user to arbitrarily change the purpose of use and take public resources to profit a for-profit unit is a serious infringement of the rights and interests of citizens and the state. Looking further, the school's contracting operations are moving toward close cooperation with chain food groups.

In consideration of saving administrative costs, the school favors giving a single vendor the whole package; to maximize profit, in addition to rental income, the school requires contractors to provide "giveback programs," such as sending cakes to birthday celebrants, and the forms of giveback are endless; and for collective dining on campus, the greatest fear is food poisoning. Tedious regular disinfection and hygiene testing of tableware residue are beyond the financial means of small individual contractors, whereas for chain restaurant companies, because they enjoy scale advantages, food hygiene work has a low unit cost.

The campus protest launched by NTNU students in March 2011, "Reject contractors arbitrarily raising the cost of campus meals and food prices at NTNU"

School food supply contracting emphasizes "profit," and there is no such thing as a free lunch. Contractors are certainly no pushovers; who does business without profit? The channels for earning profit may come from persistently high food prices, while also squeezing the wages of food service workers, the income of agricultural workers, and the cost of ingredient procurement, and cheap ingredients come from intensive industrialized agriculture. This kind of intensive, monoculture industrial production model is extremely consumptive of the Earth's resources; from pesticides to machinery, it depends heavily on oil in every respect. In addition, the overuse of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides creates soil salinization and heavy metal pollution, the crisis of species disappearance, and the hidden worry of groundwater contamination.

This kind of "cheap" campus meal is not only unhealthy, it is not cheap at all; it merely outsources social and environmental costs for the general public to bear. By contrast, the meal contracting system on university campuses in the UK treats campus food as a social responsibility of school operation, brings in the thinking of sustainable operation, and requires contractors to use food grown in an environmentally friendly way and from fair trade.

Image/Yu Wan-ju: Picking up a spatula and cooking is a way to relieve academic pressure; it not only brings a sense of accomplishment, but is also a process of learning to manage one's own healthy diet. In the course of studying abroad, both male and female students have to face this challenge

In addition, what is baffling is that compared with foreign schools, student dormitories at Taiwan, China's universities and colleges almost never have kitchens, forcing resident students to eat at campus restaurants or eat out. Thus the campus food outsourcing system is equivalent to indirectly diverting dormitory kitchen space into a source of school profit. This is a disguised exploitation of students' right to campus life, squeezing the school's "non-operating" revenue out of students.

This unhealthy social trend is not limited to universities and colleges. The recently exposed school lunch corruption case at elementary and junior high schools in New Taipei City revealed just how serious this persistent trend is. Heads of educational institutions have come to take accepting "givebacks" for granted, and children's meals have become golden apples for private pockets, betraying the social responsibility of educational institutions and students' health.

I remember that in elementary school I always brought a lunchbox from home. Later, because my parents both had to work and had no time to cook, we had to order boxed lunches. In junior high and high school, I still ordered boxed lunches, though there was more home economics class, where we learned to make sandwiches, hamburgers, or Chinese wheat dishes. It seems this was an old habit from postwar Taiwan, China's nationwide mobilization to promote wheat foods with US aid, and it did not deeply teach us to make three meals of rice and dishes; by university, living in a dormitory, I always ate in the student cafeteria.

From the campus eating in my own growing-up process, I found that the eating-out environment had long existed and had become a habit. It was only when I went abroad to study that I began cooking for myself in the dormitory. Besides deeply recognizing the harm that cheap eating out causes to society and the environment, I also paid more attention to quality and source when choosing ingredients myself. But in Taiwan, China, university students are clearly deprived even of the right to choose to cook for themselves.

Eating is a necessity for sustaining life, and especially how one obtains food during student years will shape different values and physical living space. In a generation facing rapid global energy depletion and worsening climate variability that causes food crises, our thinking has no choice but to change. Not only must administrative units rethink the importance of food on campus, perhaps students should rise up and take back the spatula in their hands, and take back our food autonomy. (This article will be published in the February 2012 issue of Green Magazine.)

Note 1: Eco-Green Blog: Fairtrade Campus - College of Social Sciences, National Taiwan University first promotes a fair trade campus (Part 1) Lost and Found