Living COVID-19 On Campus
The COVID-19 Pandemic is nothing anyone expected or hoped would happen. The setting of residential higher education is a rather particular one to the US. Residential colleges like Dickinson College are microcosms of society that, in addition to education, provide all essential needs from food, water, and shelter to seemingly essentials like healthcare, electricity, and internet to luxuries like dances, movies, social life and entertainment of all times. But they can also serve as breeding grounds for outbreaks of disease. We live, work, and play in such close quarters, it would take nearly no time at all for all community members to infect each other. In order to reduce the spread of the coronavirus among students, campuses all across the country have been closed and classes have moved to remote instruction.
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Our environment is everything that surrounds us, whether natural or human built. Changes in our environments have been witnessed across the world given the pandemic. Since the onset of the global health crisis and economic recession, some industries have reduced production and thus reduced their impacts on the environment, including reducing greenhouse gas emissions and particulate matter and the clearing of the Venice canals. Let’s be clear that climate change hasn’t magically stopped, just as emissions haven’t, but temporarily, emissions seem to have slowed and ecosystems have gained some reprieve.
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Changes have impacted constructed environments, too. Nowadays, when we go to stores, we are often funneled in one door and out another, registers are cleaned on a regular basis, and masks not only have become commonplace, but oftentimes, mandatory. The university is not without its changes as well. In fact, some students have remained on campus, and this has required colleges to modify spaces and processes for the health of these students. This photo essay attempts to describe the human place in nature in regards to food, food culture, and food service on Dickinson College's campus during the COVID-19 Pandemic.
During Spring Break, Dining Services was mainly closed. Only Union Station, a short order dining option, remained open for breakfast and lunch, as it usually does to serve employees and those students who choose to use its services.
As the College sought to buy time as it planned for the remainder of the semester, whether that included students returning to campus or moving to remote instruction, the College extended Spring Break by a week. In an initial step for justice for students who remained on campus, the dining hall was reopened for those remaining on campus, as this was a planned part of the meal plan and not a planned time frame for students to be providing for themselves.
During the second week of Spring Break, all retail operations were closed and only the dining hall opened, with a modified structure and serving times. The times listed for Monday 3/16 to Saturday 3/21 remained for the rest of the semester, with only a small adjustment for dinner to begin at 5 pm instead of at 4:45 pm.
The open hours of Dining Services is a modified schedule, based upon the normal summer schedule. These hours and serving methods were an adjustment for students and staff alike.
Orders are placed at the main entrance of the dining hall. Although a later addition, these dividers were added to the hallway in order to show students where they should stand in order to maintain six feet (two meters) of distance between each other at all times.
Social distancing is one key to preventing the spread of the novel coronavirus. The fact that the World Health Organization and public leaders everywhere have to tell us that we should stay six feet apart from each other tells us that, at least for the majority of the world, this spacing is generally unnatural. Certain cultures have different understandings and perceptions of space, so personal space is definitely also socially constructed and thus to some extent based upon nurture, but if all cultures prefer a space that is less than six feet, then there is likely something natural about that distance.
Hand sanitizer has been placed at all entrance doors to the building, at the ordering door, and at the pick up door. Additionally, paper towel dispensers have been installed by the door of bathrooms so that hands can be dried with a sanitary towel and so that they can be used to open the door without touching the handle. Many students already used hand sanitizer as they entered the dining hall, but now hand washing and alcohol-based sanitizers are especially important and their increase in occurrence represents a behavior change among the student population. Using hand sanitizer has become a sort of ritual when placing a take-out order.
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Dividers also keep distance between the door checker and the client. The door checker is to check IDs by sight only (although at this point, they do not as they simply assume that if you got in the building, you probably are a student that is supposed to eat there). This too represents a change as normally the door checker would also physically swipe your ID, but now that would be a form of transmitting the virus, and thus a change has again been adopted by Dining Services staff and clients as well.
Menus are posted on the menu board outside of the main entrance. Before COVID-19, menus would be posted for an entire day. Now they tend to be posted only when that meal begins as menu offerings change frequently. Menus are often made by deciding what must be gotten rid of from stock and thus offerings change quickly, even in regards to seemingly staple items like beverages, fruits, and milk and milk alternatives. Even some familiar recipes have been slightly altered in order to use ingredients that are already available instead of purchasing more. This menu change is mostly taken on by the cooking staff, however it is also somewhat felt by students who are now experiencing less/different options than they are used to having.
This is an example of an order form.
Students read off of the menu which items they would like. Generally, the door checker will highlight or circle options, write in any special orders or multiples, and add the order number. These are printed for every meal and are given to the student as they pick up their meal as a sort of receipt.
The door checker marks an order form and then passes that off to those who are packing the meals. They generally will shout the beverage option so that the person can get started doing that while the door checker walks the order form over to the others.
In the Dining Hall, clients would serve themselves or tell the server what they would like. At the Quarry and Union Station, orders were placed on touch screens and tickets printed behind the line. At the Underground juice bar, grease pencil dry erase cards would be filled out for orders and at the Biblio Cafe, clients would simply tell the attendant what they want and it would be prepared. This method of order taking and filling is a change for students and staff alike.
Pick Your Portion lingo has become especially important and commonly used as students often ask for double portions of certain items. This language has been a behavior change that the Center for Sustainability Education and Dining Services have tried to implement in the past few years with limited success. In this case, portion sizes have become more standardized and students feel compelled to use the language in order to get portions that they desire as to not have to return and place another order for more food.
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The normal Grab n Go door next to the "cushies" is where orders are picked up. The contents of the orders depend on the client's preferences. Servers and clients alike are not to touch the table - simply to set the items down or to pick them up. All surfaces and hands are washed by Dining Services staff every thirty minutes and as necessary. Staff and students wait to approach the table so as to not enter within six feet of each other.
Not touching surfaces and coming into close proximity to each other has required a learning curve, but most have come to understand this by now.
Before
After
Given the disregard, the College moved furniture in order to discourage the sitting and congregation in this shared space. Initially, some students would sit on top of the stacked furniture or on the floor, but many would simply move downstairs to the Underground lounge. Mostly, however, this behavior-centered design worked, and most students instead choose to carry their meals back to their residence halls and eat socially distanced. When instruction failed, behavior-centered design prevailed.
Eating in many cultures is a social experience. At Dickinson, students tend to sit together in the dining hall or in the retail units where food is procured. With the closing of the dining hall, many students would sit at the "cushies" to eat together. This sufficed the purpose of eating as a social experience, but went against the notion of social distancing. As it was close to the pick up location for meals, it also imposed the inability to practice social distancing on those who otherwise would observe it. Tape on the windows showed six feet and signs asked people to observe social distancing. Dining Services staff also asked students to move apart, expanding their roles to social distancing enforcers. Students disregarded instructions. (Note: this predates widespread mask wearing by the general public).
Meals come with a lot of packaging including paper take out boxes and bags, utensil packets with napkins, salt and pepper, cups of beverages, and plastic bags, cups, and wrappings of condiments and deserts. While much of this packaging can be recycled or composted, some must be sent to the landfill. Additionally, composting infrastructure maintenance on campus has gone to the back burner in order to protect our essential farmworkers. There is also no guarantee that students would know how to sort their waste correctly.
The nature of the beast is that disposable take out containers are necessary in this situation in order to continue providing food service and keep clients and employees safe. While I am usually used to dining in or utilizing our campus Ecotainer program, returning reusable take out containers would potentially introduce germs back into the system and, at this point, the infrastructure for that type of system is not prioritized nor feasible.
Some students choose to eat all meals from the dining hall, others cook all meals in their residence halls, and others will do a hybrid. I personally generally eat breakfast at home (if I wake up in time). My friend Scout doesn’t go to the dining hall at all. Sometimes we cook together as a house - we live together and have been in isolation together since mid-March so there is no need to isolate from each other. We are very fortunate to have campus infrastructure in place to continue to house and feed us and while this definitely was not a foreseen end to this semester, we have made the best of it for ourselves in our new campus family unit.
