PC:Emma Hoffman
Chloe Lampros-Monroe
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Emma Hoffman
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Students come to Bryn Mawr from a variety of different backgrounds, both domestic and international, bringing with them their own food cultures and preferences. Some students have extra concerns, needing to follow a diet that is vegan, vegetarian, or gluten free, as well as other dietary restrictions revolving around religion, such as the need for kosher/halal options. Students often have many concerns about health, especially after transitioning to a different environment. According to Sarah E. Gores, a registered nurse and family nurse practitioner, “as young adults move into an independent living situation, there is a high risk for unhealthy eating habits” (Gores, 2008), a fact that makes this issue especially important. On its website Bryn Mawr advertises that is ranked in the Top #10 for Campus Food by the Princeton Review, and that it was given a grade of A on the Peta2 Vegan Report Card (“About US: Award & Recognition,” 2017). How well does the Bryn Mawr dining hall respond to student needs? I conducted interviews with ten students to find out the scoop.
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In this article, Emma discusses late-night snacking on Bryn Mawr's campus. She talks about dining hall hours, and accessibility to food late at night, when most college students are still awake and working. She questions, which students have the ability to eat healthily during the wee hours of the morning? And is it fair?
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Toby Makowski
The Nuts and Bolts of Allergen Labeling in BMCDS
Looking over the dining hall during Passover, I found myself having to be much more conscious of the allergen labels that normally I ignore completely. Being lucky enough to have no food allergies, all of my dietary restrictions come from being Jewish. During Passover, we don’t eat leavened food. This often means that any food with wheat, barley, oats, rye, and spelt are banned from our plates for those eight days; and as someone who eats in the dining halls almost exclusively, Passover means I have to navigate them with a very different mindset. People with food allergies always have to be careful about what allergens – whatever substance that can trigger an allergic reaction –are in their meals, made even harder by the way the open-kitchen plans of both main dining halls makes cross-contamination possible. One of the ways Bryn Mawr’s dining halls work to keep themselves accessible to all students is by providing accurate and up to date allergen warnings on the labels placed above each dish.
I interviewed Richard Clow, Assistant Director at Bryn Mawr College Dining Services (BMCDS) to talk about how Bryn Mawr labels its allergens, and what goes into creating those labels. BMCDS attempts to have a label on every food item that is out to provide accurate allergen and nutrition information: vegetarian dishes are marked with veg, vegan dishes are given a v next to the item name, and along the bottom of the little card either runs the list of given allergens or a disclaimer to “please see a manager for allergen information”. How are the specific listed allergens determined? BMCDS keeps track of the “Big-8” allergens (milk, eggs, fish, shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, and soybeans), which account for the vast majority (something like 90%) of all food-based allergic reactions, and puts those on their labels.
How? Bryn Mawr Dining Services uses a sophisticated software program for menu management, and has done so for the past four years. “You essentially start with all of your ingredients,” Clow says, describing how the process begins by surveying each and every ingredient used within a recipe to determine whether it contained any of the big eight allergens, whether by looking at the label or literally calling the manufacturer. “We had to stop using some ingredients because the manufacturer would say ‘I don’t know’ what the ‘may contain other ingredients’ means or what those ‘other ingredients’ were,” Clow remembers.
As BMCDS creates recipes they add it to a database, which automatically draws upon the ingredients already input into the menu management system and auto-populates a field with allergen warnings. Therefore when the recipe is printed has a section that lists any possible Big-8 allergens that the cooks and student workers can consult if anyone has any further questions. Each recipe is carefully double and triple checked at all stages by the people who work on importing recipes into the database manager, and Bryn Mawr’s nutritionist. And when a recipe is made, the labels are printed with the relevant information and put out to aid students in making dietary choices.
The process of creating each label is a system of moving parts: at least three people have to make the time to look over and double check each recipe and ingredient to make sure that there are no “hidden” allergens within it. ‘Milk’, for instance is an allergen can be listed as “sour milk solids,” “whey,” or “lactalbumin phosphate,” among many titles. None of which really sound like a common sense ‘milk’. So there is a great deal of time and human labor that goes into simply creating, maintaining, cross-examining and updating the labels, which is not often recognized.
BMCDS food labels are often critiqued as being either overly cautious in their labeling or under cautious in what allergens they list, but after doing the research for this paper I find that people are ungenerous in their assumptions of what goes on when creating those little slips of paper.
I interviewed Richard Clow, Assistant Director at Bryn Mawr College Dining Services (BMCDS) to talk about how Bryn Mawr labels its allergens, and what goes into creating those labels. BMCDS attempts to have a label on every food item that is out to provide accurate allergen and nutrition information: vegetarian dishes are marked with veg, vegan dishes are given a v next to the item name, and along the bottom of the little card either runs the list of given allergens or a disclaimer to “please see a manager for allergen information”. How are the specific listed allergens determined? BMCDS keeps track of the “Big-8” allergens (milk, eggs, fish, shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, and soybeans), which account for the vast majority (something like 90%) of all food-based allergic reactions, and puts those on their labels.
How? Bryn Mawr Dining Services uses a sophisticated software program for menu management, and has done so for the past four years. “You essentially start with all of your ingredients,” Clow says, describing how the process begins by surveying each and every ingredient used within a recipe to determine whether it contained any of the big eight allergens, whether by looking at the label or literally calling the manufacturer. “We had to stop using some ingredients because the manufacturer would say ‘I don’t know’ what the ‘may contain other ingredients’ means or what those ‘other ingredients’ were,” Clow remembers.
As BMCDS creates recipes they add it to a database, which automatically draws upon the ingredients already input into the menu management system and auto-populates a field with allergen warnings. Therefore when the recipe is printed has a section that lists any possible Big-8 allergens that the cooks and student workers can consult if anyone has any further questions. Each recipe is carefully double and triple checked at all stages by the people who work on importing recipes into the database manager, and Bryn Mawr’s nutritionist. And when a recipe is made, the labels are printed with the relevant information and put out to aid students in making dietary choices.
The process of creating each label is a system of moving parts: at least three people have to make the time to look over and double check each recipe and ingredient to make sure that there are no “hidden” allergens within it. ‘Milk’, for instance is an allergen can be listed as “sour milk solids,” “whey,” or “lactalbumin phosphate,” among many titles. None of which really sound like a common sense ‘milk’. So there is a great deal of time and human labor that goes into simply creating, maintaining, cross-examining and updating the labels, which is not often recognized.
BMCDS food labels are often critiqued as being either overly cautious in their labeling or under cautious in what allergens they list, but after doing the research for this paper I find that people are ungenerous in their assumptions of what goes on when creating those little slips of paper.
Bryn Mawr College
101 N.Merion Ave
Bryn Mawr,PA 19010
(610)-526-5000
101 N.Merion Ave
Bryn Mawr,PA 19010
(610)-526-5000