Last week, the normal apathy that I felt when looking at the food selection offered by Creighton’s dining halls was replaced by a slight hope that maybe, just maybe, Brandeis and Becker would offer more food that was at least halfway decent.

It was “Fresh Week” after all, that one week when Creighton admits that “hey, this week we finally shelled out a few more dollars to buy food that doesn’t make you question when the expiration date was on it.”  I did appreciate “Fresh Week,” but really, it shouldn’t happen just one week a year, coincidentally the one week when Creighton will have some of the most visitors it will have all year.

By looking purely at cost, it does make sense for dining services such as Sodexo to avoid serving as much fresh produce as they can, as fresh food costs more than frozen or canned food.  Not to mention the fact that fresh food goes bad more quickly, so dining services lose more money when they have a lot of fresh produce that they eventually can’t serve.

However, I still don’t think that providing more fresh produce would cost Sodexo that much more.  I feel like a big part of the cost of providing more fresh food options could be cut down by focusing on quality rather

than quantity.

Some of the frozen vegetable options that Sodexo insists on providing are so mushy and soaked in water that they are basically inedible, and there’s really no point in providing them. I would rather have less fruit and vegetable options, so long as the options that were provided were at least good quality ones.

Creighton itself could also reduce its carbon footprint by partnering with more local sellers.  This would lessen the amount of resources, such as fossil fuels, that are used to process the food and ship it from the producer to the school.  Unfortunately, none of this could be done without the support of Sodexo. If Creighton was somehow able to work out a compromise with Sodexo and showcase more food from small, local farms, then in turn they would receive more support from the community.

I also believe that more people would eat their meals in the dining halls if the food that was provided there was fresher.  In high schools that have focused on providing more local, farm-fresh food, some have more than doubled the amount of students that eat lunch there.  This probably wouldn’t have the same effect on a university as it does a high school, but I still think that more students would eat Creighton’s food if it was better quality and Sodexo could offset some of the higher costs of fresh produce.

Particularly for upperclassmen, who are probably eager to never set foot in Brandeis again once they step off-campus, they might be more eager to eat their meals on-campus if Creighton provided at least some higher quality food.

Of course, the fact that huge dining services have to serve mass amounts of food makes this all the more difficult.  I don’t expect Sodexo to start serving a wide variety of exotic, completely fresh fruits and vegetables in Creighton’s dining halls. But I think that having a “Fresh Week” has reminded students that it is possible to serve some fresh food in mass amounts.

While I don’t think that it’s realistic to expect mostly fresh food every single day, I think that providing at least a few more fresh food options is easier than Sodexo and Creighton make it out to be.