Climate-conscious students will soon enjoy more meat-free options in Berlin's university canteens

[boingboing]

Originally published at: Climate-conscious students will soon enjoy more meat-free options in Berlin's university canteens | Boing Boing

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[Papasan]

What, no pepperoni pizza Wednesdays?

[ChuckV]

[Papasan]

So what you’re saying is you hate pizza?

[ChuckV]

Indifferent to pepperoni, too often I find it bland with little flavor. So, well seasoned tofu might be preferable.

[Mercenary_Garage]

The student canteen in the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) in Dublin adopted an unusual approach to feeding the students about 10 years ago. The canteen was always good value, but there was a change of emphasis to more healthy and ethical meals, the majority of which are vegetarian/vegan.

It’s really well run with a lot of input from the students. It’s inexpensive, high quality and it’s located in the vaulted basement of the former Powers Distillery.

The college is in the general vicinity of the Guinness factory, so if you’re going to visit that (during term time) I’d recommend a detour to NCAD for a coffee or a meal.

Luncheonette At NCAD Wins Café Of The Year

[Papasan]

Go Soyrizo [link below] it gives you the spicy meat texture and an added benefit of a good hearty sent while cooking on the pizza.

Soyrizo™

[SteveL]

Back when I was at University, they mandated 50% vegetarian pizza at all the Student Union pizza shops. Guess which style of pizza sat there and got cold until they just threw it out while the other style sold out quickly.

[Purplecat]

@boingboing

According to Deutsches Studentenwerk spokesperson Stefan Grob, university cafeterias and canteens across Germany currently offer 30-50% vegetarian options, “But in Berlin, you have a critical mass.”

In 2019, Berlin universities fed about 5.6 million meals to students in its canteens. That same year a survey found that 13.5% of Berlin’s student population described themselves as keeping a vegan diet, compared with just 1.6% in the country as a whole, while a further 33% said they were vegetarians.

via The Guardian

So in all other universities, the menu corresponds roughly to the distribution of dietary preferences amongst these students, wheras after these changes, the preferences of the majority will only grudgingly be catered to four days a week. Perhaps the mathematics department needs to offer some catch-up courses.

[jerwin]

50%?

Not every town can support a Bhodi Dharma Pizza outlet.

" … Its sauce was all but crunchy with fistfuls of herbs only marginally Italian and more appropriate in a cough remedy, the rennetless cheese reminded customers variously of bottled hollandaise or joint compound, and the options were all vegetables rigorously organic, whose high water content saturated, long before it baked through, a stone-ground twelve-grain crust with the lightness and digestibility of a manhole cover.” – Thomas Pynchon Vineland

[Mike.71]

What kind of vegetarian pizza?
Marinara is vegan, and Margherita is vegetarian.

disciplinare%202008%20UK.pdf

Pizza is born vegetarian.

[SteveL]

Don’t remember, as nobody touched the stuff.
Their entire social engineering scheme collapsed after a few months as people just ordered delivery instead of brought their own leftovers.

[Mike.71]

Probavly they made bad pizza, or their vegetarian option was with weird toppings.
In Naples there’s Pizzeria Da Michele, since 1870. They only serve marinara an margherita, that are vegetarian. See in Google Street view people waiting outside to get their pizza.

Traditional food and diet is mainly vegetarian, vegan it’s a bit harder to spot, but it’s entirely possible to make a good and tasty vegetarian menu. Problem is when someone tries vegan lookalike food and tries to present it at the real thing.

[anon77190095]

Yeah, we cook a lot of Italian food, and the changes you need to make a lot of dishes from vegetarian to vegan are minor, usually just leave out the cheese.

People sometimes forget that a lot of italian food is peasant fare, and meat/fish was only rarely on the menu.

[girard]

Good. While individual dietary choices have their value, we need systemic and institutional changes like this to effect actual change.

@Purplecat

So in all other universities, the menu corresponds roughly to the distribution of dietary preferences amongst these students, wheras after these changes, the preferences of the majority will only grudgingly be catered to four days a week. Perhaps the mathematics department needs to offer some catch-up courses.

Eh. The vegan dishes can literally be eaten by everyone of every dietary preference (barring particular allergies to particular dishes, of course), and thus better serve the largest majority of student, if you want to approach this from a bean-counter mindset. A meat-based menu could only serve 60% of students, while a plant-based one can serve 100% of them.

And regardless of people’s personal preferences leading them to make cruel and unsustainable choices, these measures are a way to address larger systemic problems that will ultimately help everyone. In the same way that, even if a majority of parents in a state want the individual preference to send their kids to school unmasked, it’s still safer to require that kids wear masks.

[girard]

I enjoy soyrizo a lot, but don’t know if I’d enjoy chorizo on a pizza (unless it was some kind of Mexican pizza fusion thing). I like slicing up Beyond Italian sausage on my pizzas though. I generally find them more flavorful than bog standard vegan pepperoni (though I won’t turn my nose up at that, either, honestly).