Concordia joins Food Allergy Network
Eating healthy, balanced meals in Anderson Dining Center has just gotten a lot easier.
This fall, Concordia Dining Services has teamed up with The Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network so that students with food allergies and intolerances will be able to find foods they can safely make, and to spread awareness to other students about the topic.
FAAN is a nonprofit organization that was established in 1991. It currently has a membership of over 30,000 families, dieticians, nurses, physicians, school staff and representatives from government agencies as well as some food and pharmaceutical industries.
Concordia joined FAAN so that the services Concordia Dining Services offers can be accessed by prospective students with food allergies and intolerances and will have the information they need when trying to find a college that will accommodate their dietary needs. The FAAN Web site will also provide them with FAAN ambassadors, which are students with food allergies at each of the schools. Interested students can also contact these ambassadors to ask questions about dealing with their allergies in college or to request peer-to-peer perspectives from them.
Before Concordia Dining Services joined FAAN, it was already providing services especially aimed towards students with special dietetic requirements.
The services Concordia Dining Center provided for students with special dietary needs was a key reason why freshman Kendal Christensen decided to attend Concordia.
Christensen, who is allergic to tree nuts (which include almonds, cashews, walnuts, pecans, hazelnuts and pistachios), potatoes and garbanzo beans, felt like Concordia would be more accommodating in helping her find foods that she could eat with her meal plan. The fact that Concordia had just joined FAAN, which Christensen had been a member of since she was five years old, made her feel more comfortable eating at the college.
“I liked how Dining Services told me that if I wanted to meet with someone, I could,” Christensen said. “They seemed really helpful, and it was really nice to know that there’s that open door.”
Dining Services also provides many services for those who don’t have food allergies and intolerances.
The college has four dieticians on staff to meet with students anytime free of charge. Net Nutrition computer stations are also set up inside of Anderson Dining Center which give the nutrition information and ingredients list for every food served; and the red, yellow, and green dot labels on every dish in Anderson indicate how many grams of fat are in each food item.
Other new features that Dining Services offer is the “DS Input Group” that was started last year on Facebook, along with a “DS Food Allergies and Intolerances Group” that started through the Web site. This will allow students to provide feedback and let Dining Services know what foods they’d like to have available.
This year Dining Services has also added Rice Chex to the cereal bar, as well as sugar-free cookies for students with diabetes, both upon the request of students from the Facebook group.
Dining Service’s Residential Dining Supervisor Meredith Wagner knows how important it is to listen to the opinions of Concordia students when deciding what foods to serve in Dining Services.
“Students at Concordia are our biggest customers,” Wagner said. “We want to [keep them informed] so we can educate them about what we’re doing and what we can do in the future.”
Wagner estimates there are 15 to 20 students at Concordia who have specific food allergies, but is certain that there are many more with food intolerances.
Dietetic intern Tiffany Dexter has noticed that this number keeps growing.
“We are seeing more food allergies this year than in past years,” Dexter said.
One reason why Wagner thinks that there are more and more students with food allergies at Concordia is because more diagnoses are being made. More people are becoming aware that certain symptoms they experience after eating may be related to a food allergy or intolerance.
Because of this growing number of students with special dietary needs, it is reassuring that the college now has an organization like FAAN to help them accommodate these students even better.
The help that the dieticians at Concordia have given students like Christensen has gone above and beyond what she expected of them, affecting her life in ways beyond merely helping her find the right foods to eat. Christensen is now considering changing her major from history to nutrition and dietetics.
“Simply meeting them showed me a possible career that could involve working with food allergies,” she said, “and helping others with food allergies without becoming a medical doctor.”
