Poisoned Ivy

Over the past six months, the New York Department of Public Health and Mental Hygiene has returned to campus for its annual sanitation inspections, the procedure responsible for every conspicuous restaurant-window letter grade in New York City—and for making those in the know here at Columbia feel a bit uneasy. Students who follow campus news developments might have been versed on what had been the status quo: John Jay, Hewitt, and Ferris all received alarmingly high scores on last year’s inspections, with present improper thawing procedures, lack of protection from sources of contamination, and mice, rats, and cockroaches, in addition to “evidence” of said pests (interpret that as you wish).

In some of the ensuing comment threads on Bwog, students with a background in waiting or food preparation seemed unable to form a consensus as to whether such spectacular failure was actually extraordinary. I myself admittedly have only a small amount of foodservice experience to speak to the practicality point. I can, however, see from the NYDOHMH website that the majority of restaurants in New York receive A grades. Either way, I am inclined toward pretty certain disgust. Mice and their “evidence” are carriers of leptospirosis, ricketsiallpox, lymphocytic choriomeningitis, hantavirus, and salmonella, and the tapeworm, ringworm, and H. Pylori parasites—“potential[ly] expos[ed]” food means lots of chances to contract these bugs. Incidentally, I happen to know many who have gotten salmonella here, present company included. This is an experience I’d prefer to avoid in the future, as would those I know. It doesn’t really take a doctor, activist, or even germophobe to identify, does it?

The apathetic may shrug off mice, flies, and the like as the scourge of urban food establishments around the world. However, I’m not aware of any other restaurant in the world that contractually binds people to pay for its food, let alone as a condition of something totally unrelated (like, say, an education). This is a university of uniformly mandatory meal plans all around for “community-building” for first-years, if for nobody else. But this kind of implementation doesn’t look very community-conscious at all. Columbia and Barnard may not be literally force-feeding anyone, but requiring a meal plan, thereby pressuring students to use it (obviously) and very possibly precluding many from having money for better, comparatively cheaper, and demonstrated more hygienic food, is the next closest thing.

In any case, when the NYDOHMH stopped by again this year it seemed reasonable to expect the scores to improve. Some did: John Jay, for instance, eliminated two out of three infestations—a somewhat comforting change, if only for the fact that mice alone kept it out of the B range this time around. Hewitt, on the other hand—that of the school with the, ahem, mandatory universal meal plan—received the exact same score as last year: a decidedly B-range 23 (including that count about “sources of contamination”). Dining dollar hotspot Café 212, as we all know, got a 62. Sure it closed last week to exterminate—but what negligence on the part of Columbia had brought it up 56 points from its eight points 20 months before? The net change in cafeterias in points since the last inspections, in fact, appears to be positive.

Adequate food is a basic human right. Food from an unclean kitchen is not adequate—it is not only potentially physically sickening, but it’s psychologically sickening to ingest in the first place. Perhaps this point will not resonate with everyone, at least as long as Columbia cafeterias, by means of whatever legal loophole has somehow kept their own scarlet letters out of sight, continue taking advantage of whatever combination of ignorance, forgetfulness, or wishful thinking has kept students quiet thus far. But for many it will. And whether or not any contamination actually reaches students, at a certain threshold that possibility is exponentially higher.

So it’s about time we spoke up and called Columbia out on neglectful sanitation practices and, as such, a fundamental disrespect for the bodily integrity of entire groups of its student population. It’s our right; after all, it is us who will have to pay.

The author is a Barnard College sophomore majoring in history.