Apparently the City of Philadelphia is considering its own ban on trans-fat, modeled after that of New York.
Major food retailers such as Starbucks and Kentucky Fried Chicken have banned trans fats. Trans-fat oil, associated with bad cholesterol, is scheduled to be eliminated in New York City by July. A proposed New Jersey ban on trans-fats in restaurants has remained in a legislative committee since October. Philadelphia’s City Council is scheduled to vote today on the fate of fryer oil in restaurants and food carts.
The article is mostly about local universities removing trans-fats from their cafeterias, which I’m all for. I have no issues with restaurants and food service providers removing them voluntarily, through market forces. Apparently my alma mater is getting in on this too:
Drexel University, which also contracts with Sodexho, switched to trans-fat-free oil in January 2006. In addition to its bread, tortillas and cookies, the school will get trans-fat-free doughnuts and cakes, said Marie Faherty, resident district manager for Sodexho there.
Dan Steinberg, Drexel’s Student Government president and a senior graphic-design major, said he hadn’t noticed a change in the food’s taste.
“A lot of that is a mental thing. I’ve been a resident assistant for three years, and coming down here with my residents, the food gets better every year,” he said.
The food is getting better every year? This isn’t the Drexel I went to! When I went, they still had 32nd street open and lots of artery clogging street vendor food, which is where most of us ate. The cafeteria was known as the “all you can stomach” plan, since if you signed up, you could eat as much as you wanted to, but who wanted to? Now, the street vendors are gone, and the cafeteria is serving tasty food with no trans-fats? Crazy.
It’s good to hear that alumni donations and the constant increase in tuition is going someplace besides statues of gold dragons. Yeah, the food was pretty bad when I was there. I went one year on the meal plan – if you were a freshman living in the dorms, you had to do it. The next year, I took all of my co-op money and lived off the lunch trucks and Powelton Pizza.
And that’s why I graduated with a net gain of 60 lbs.
By the time I was going to Drexel, the cafeteria was already starting to improve a little, at least as far as taste went.