The second Campus Food Committee (CFC) meeting further elaborated on the first meeting with many solutions.
Oakland University Student Congress (OUSC) held the second CFC meeting of the year on Feb. 12 in room 125 of the Oakland Center.
An initiative proposed by Golden Grizzlies Food Pantry representative Kaeli Lowe was a grab-and-go option for breakfast and dinner meals to alleviate crowded dining halls with time constraints.
“The breakfast sandwich and the smoothies are a bit of a hassle for the morning crew because it’s all so chaotic,” Lowe said. “So the grab-and-go options are a great idea manageable for a one-person team.”
Circling back to the last meeting’s discussion on food-related events for housing, Chartwells Executive Chef Kevin Peasgood shared some plans for upcoming events.
“Bistro pop-ups—we have the Pacific Rim one going on March 8th, we just did the Super Bowl one this past Friday and that went well,” Peasgood said. “Cooking class—I believe March 20 is the tentative date for the apartments, that’ll be on full utilization of food.”
As far as cashless campus complications go, Lowe also pointed out a lack of advertising for putting cash on Grizzcards and a remedy for the lack of information.
“Most people didn’t know about the Grizz Cash, being able to put physical cash on your card just with the machines,” Lowe said. “They have the machine by the front desk. Moving it towards the restaurants and advertising it a bit more could probably help.”
OUSC President Murryum Farooqi advised all student organization representatives present to utilize polls and surveys to better reflect student body sentiment, following the food pantry’s recent use of polls.
Oakland University Student Activities Funding Board Representative (SAFB) Gio Liotti also reported some complaints regarding the Chartwells website and cultural foods.
“Some people expressed hesitance about ordering sometimes because they could be clicking on one that wasn’t like student price,” Liotti said. “They complain that they can’t get cultural food. Whenever they tried to do it it would take a long time to get an email back from Chartwells.”
A proposed solution was incorporating an orientation guide to cultural foods for the upcoming semester.
“It would be a good idea to do at the end of each semester a type of presentation or orientation for groups that are doing special requests or cultural foods,” Farooqi said. “Saying, ‘Here’s what we’ve done in the past for certain groups, here’s how the process works.’”
“A lot of these things will take some time to do,” Oakland Center Director Chris Reed said. “I don’t know if we can do it before the summer just because of what goes into it, but we will definitely communicate that.”
The possible incorporation of a smoothie option was further discussed.
“In the focus groups that Chartwells did last semester [the support for smoothies] was like 1-in-4, one of the highest requested new concepts that we don’t have,” Reed said. “The more we see students on campus engaging on campus, the easier it is for us to do.”
The meeting finished with the possibility of hosting a future CFC meeting with a gallery and live silent audience, either virtual or in-person, so students can be more involved as initiatives and solutions move forward.
“We can do a gallery, on a case-by-case basis if someone wants to sit and watch or just to listen,” Farooqi said. “We can do a ‘comments from the gallery’ section.”
