After a 50-year food fight, can changes to SFU food services really make the cut?
By Ariane Madden
Photos By Mark Burnham
It’s 5:21 p.m. on a Tuesday, and you suddenly find yourself running from Images Theatre to McKenzie Café in the hopes of grabbing a snack to tide yourself over until your evening tutorials are over and you can actually have dinner. Alas, you arrive at the cafeteria only to find that it’s entirely closed down and your only option is a squeamish-looking muffin at the nearby Renaissance stand.
This little narrative seems to be a common one here at SFU, along with never-ending complaints about the price of food and the quality of ingredients served at many of the campus’ food service locations. The vegetables are never fresh, the spaces aren’t inviting, and the line-ups are just too long. Packing a lunch is an admirable feat that some people certainly are able to do, but when you know that your soup is going to sit dangerously sideways in your backpack from South Surrey to Burnaby every morning, it just doesn’t seem worth the hassle.
Food services at this commuter campus can be frustrating at best. Indeed, food service at SFU has been rated as some of the worst in the country and is consistently at the top of the ‘must improve’ list when students are surveyed about campus initiatives.
Students in residence have struggled with the food options on campus perhaps most vocally over the past few years. With nearly 600 of the 2000 residents on a mandatory meal plan, any student who dares take a class at Surrey or the downtown campuses is hard-pressed to spend all of their $1,350 at Chartwells-run locations at Burnaby. A trip to UBC residences almost always incites jealous groaning from residents frustrated with high-priced food that is often over-cooked and tasteless. So where did it all go wrong?
While it may seem like SFU’s food woes are a recent complaint, the cause of our belly aching goes back much farther — 10 years. The very fabric of the SFU community has been entwined in the food services debate from day one.
The hatred started early, and it started strong. Students in the ‘60s went so far as to stage a “Burger Boycott” which saw hundreds of students and faculty refusing to eat at on-campus eateries for days, costing the businesses money until they finally caved to student demands and promised better prices and higher quality food. However, the promises proved empty when food services on campus did not improve significantly enough to prevent a full review in 1972.
SFU was just a baby university, yet it was already experiencing the kinds of hiccoughs that would have repercussions for years to come. The food services report opened up with some rather telling — and sad — commentary. It seemed, as the committee said, that the original vision of the university community was not being realized and that the sense of community was “beginning to break apart”.
They recognized that food services are an essential part of the sense of community on campus and yet were stuck with a situation where everything including the kitchen sink seemed inadequate to serve the students. The report talked about a feeling of “coldness” in the dining spaces, and how food itself was of low quality and lacked variety. The students were tired of monotony and the administration needed to address it.
A later report spoke of the inefficiencies of campus dining on the mountain, and that the school was only built for grab-and-go service. In the space that is now Triple O’s, the kitchen was cramped and had inadequate ventilation for food service because the building was simply not designed for it. SFU was haphazardly trying to put together the kinds of amenities that the school had no knowledge or ability to administer. From the time SFU opened its doors, to the time of the report, it had already been through at least three campus food providers and not one of them was able to meet the needs of the student body. After the two reports in the mid-1970s blasted the existing system, some small changes were made and the topic was left mostly untouched until the early 1990s.
After 10 years of the then-food service provider “consistently turn[ing] a deaf ear to student concerns, while stretching the boundaries of digestion”, a new American provider only brought new skepticism from the student body. Such critics were proven right when the company moved in with another high-priced menu that lacked variety and basic standards of quality. Then, after the service provider shut down a DSU barbecue in Convocation Mall, citing its near-monopolistic contract with the school, students staged a one week boycott of the cafeterias which ultimately led to the surrendering of the food contract within a few short months.
The power was finally given to some local hands, ICL services, which was the catering arm of White Spot restaurants. New services were added that helped keep the university competitive even after the Maggie Benston Centre cafeteria and newly-expanded pub had opened to expand student choices around campus. There seemed to be a light at the end of the tunnel and food services on Burnaby Mountain were improving, but a few years and a corporate take-over of ICL later, SFU signed a contract with Chartwells in 2001.
The current main food services provider for SFU and the only provider for residence is the now-infamous Chartwells. Chartwells is the university catering arm of one of the largest food service employers in the world — Compass Group — who also caters to the U.S. military. Though the university’s relationship with Chartwells has never led to a full-blown boycott as has been the case with previous generations of SFU students, the agreement hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing either.
In 2005, the institution of mandatory meal plans for the new residence towers caused a stink when residents realized that any left over money from the fall semester could not be carried over to the following spring. While the university ate the costs of allowing the carry-over to take place that year, the concession only came after much fuss from both sides of the argument. And the fuss didn’t end at the meal plans: complaints of dismal food quality coupled with sky-high pricing garnered SFU national attention when a Facebook-based “food-fight” broke out in 2007. Students organized Facebook groups en masse protesting the dismal state of affairs and the national media blew up with reports about the situation. SFU rated the lowest in Maclean’s university ratings in the food category that same year and has remained consistently low since. When Tim Hortons opened in 2009, students rejoiced at finally having a cheap and reasonable food option available to them west of Cornerstone.
Finally, 11 years after Chartwells first moved onto campus and after 50 years of (sometimes literal) food fighting at Simon Fraser, the newly-minted Ancillaries Director Mark McLaughlin has high hopes and sky-high visions for changes and improvements to food services at SFU that, if done right, might have a fighting chance of creating the kind of food community that students have been begging for decades to get.
“SFU needs to determine its own needs and tell the companies what we want,” said McLaughlin. “That’s what all of this [consulting students] is supposed to do.”
Originally hailing from Bishop’s University, McLaughlin speaks of SFU as having a diverse community with diverse cultural needs. With some students living at Burnaby’s residences and commuting to Surrey regularly, meal plan money often goes to waste when they can’t spend it at satellite campuses. Similarly, students from Fraser International College get short breaks between classes and there are no food options in the Discovery Park for them to turn to.
On the retail side, contracts to Tim Hortons, Subway, and White Spot have helped bring money back to the university and have helped to calm some of the gripes of previous years, but if the results of recent surveys have anything to say, food services at SFU is still not satisfying student needs. McLaughlin hopes to turn this around as early as September.
The first step has been consulting with students and faculty. Numerous surveys about food services have been sent out in recent months with overwhelming results. Ancillary services has also sought the assistance of external consultant David Porter — a specialist in university food services with a business degree from Harvard and whose consulting firm has catered to dozens of American universities.
One of the primary goals of any and all changes that will take place, says McLaughlin, is for catering services at SFU to recognize how food can be a social gathering place, central to the community in creating a ‘home away from home’ whether it be at the residence dining hall or at other places on campus. McLaughlin sees this project as an attempt to bolster the community at SFU and to integrate the needs of the diverse population that now inhabits our hallways.
A food services committee has also been created which includes representatives from the SFSS, GSS, Residence and Housing, and Health and Counseling, as well as Sustainable SFU. The university is taking the issue seriously and wants to make it better.
Residence-specific surveys are likely to be rolled out within the coming days, the data from which will add to the thousands of views already expressed to the university in recent months. Altogether, the information will help McLaughlin and the food services committee to spell out our exact needs. The hope, explained McLaughlin, is for the university to have a solid plan in place by June.
If all goes well, the changes won’t be temporary either. A new dedicated food services manager for the entire campus will help to make sure that standards are maintained for years to come. Furthermore, with programs like food waste composting and the Go Green Container Exchange, SFU is already being seen as a leader in campus food services sustainability. Adding in that the university is working towards incorporating fair-trade products to vendor offerings, and the desires of more ethical consumers will be better met on campus.
While only time will tell if the university can right almost 50 years of food turmoil, SFU’s food fight might actually be coming to a close. McLaughlin certainly hopes so.
“It’s a complex issue, but it’s important. We’ve got one chance to do it right . . . Students deserve [better food on campus], and in the end we’re here for the students.”
A questionnaire whose questions reflects the feedback provided in the November 2011 food surveys is currently online at www.sfu.ca/foodforthought.html for students interested in providing feedback about SFU’s food services.
