What started out as a simple bet with a friend to stop eating meat for a week turned into a lifestyle change for Molly Cantrall.
During her freshman year, the international relations senior gave up meat.
“I found myself not craving it at all,” she said. “It was healthier for me, so I stopped doing it.
Although she wasn’t too impressed with the cafeteria’s standard menu, Cantrall found no difficulty making the transition with the help of campus cafeteria alternative menus.
“They generally have a good number of vegetarian entrees every meal,” she said. “I found it easier to find stuff to eat at the cafeteria as opposed to when I go home.”
Despite MSU’s ability to cater to vegetarian needs, it did not make the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ top 10 colleges doing the best job providing acceptable meals for vegetarians and vegans.
Danielle Moore, PETA’s education manager , said nearly 4,000 students nationwide that typically eat vegetarian meals rated their schools’ effort to provide the alternative. The surveys were followed up by analysis from 45 college food service departments. New York University topped PETA’s first list of veggie-friendly institutions.
She said about 20 percent of college students claim to be vegetarians - and there have been a lot of changes in menus on college campuses to adapt to them.
“When I was in college, you just didn’t have the options that kids have today,” Moore said. “You didn’t have the soy milk or the soy-based dessert.”
Bruce Haskell, University Housing’s food service coordinator, said each of MSU’s 15 cafeterias try to provide a meatless alternative each day for lunch and dinner, but run into low demand.
“The difficulty we run into is the interest in a lot of this is not as big as some of the other entrees,” he said. “A lot of that depends on demand because we can’t buy in large quantities for an undetermined demand.
“There is difference between meatless and vegetarian. Different people perceive vegetarianism differently. A meatless item with cheese is not going to satisfy a vegan, unless it’s a vegetable-product cheese.”
A low demand hasn’t stopped food services from planning cook-to-order stations for vegetarians next year. Cafeterias will prepare different items for vegetarians on an as-need basis to improve the variety and quality, he said.
Craig Liddicoat, food service coordinator at Wilson Hall, said his cafeteria regularly provides vegetarian burgers and hot dogs as well as meatless pastas.
“When we are preparing a meal, we look at the past consumption,” he said. “That helps us to determine how much we are going to produce in the future.
“Some of the items, like the vegetarian hot dogs, the color is fairly normal, but if you look at the shape, it has square corners to it. It doesn’t have a lot of eye appeal to it.”
Indiana University, the only Big Ten university on PETA’s list, ranked No. 4.
Sandra Fowler, director of Residential Dining Services at Indiana, said the cafeterias provide a vegetarian alternative to 10 percent of its nearly 10,000 residents for 30 years.
“We have one residence hall that really caters to the vegetarian clientele,” she said. “We make sure that at every location, we have something for the vegetarian.”
