Carleton’s residence cafeteria has added kosher options to its menu. This option will be open to all students and will help accommodate Jewish students at Carleton who follow kosher dietary restrictions.
According to David Van Dyk, general manager of Carleton’s food service, Aramark Canada, the cafeteria already offers halal and vegetarian options in its rotation and is now doing something similar with kosher options.
“As Dining Services does not operate a Kosher kitchen on Campus, we were able to source prepared meals from a local certified Kosher supplier,” Van Dyk said via email.
“We have tried to address the needs of individual students where we are able to do so.”
Second-year biology student Lewis Novack was one of the first students to push for this change in the cafeteria menu last year.
“I talked to the cafeteria [staff] and they basically dismissed it saying, ‘there’s no kosher kitchen. There’s not a feasible option right now,’” Novack said.
However, with the support of the Rideau River Residence Association, Carleton University Students’ Association, and Carleton’s vice-president (university services) Ed Kane, Novack said he was able meet with the general manager of Aramark to discuss the possibility of a kosher option.
Novack said he also had the support of Jewish student group Hillel Ottawa. He explained the challenges of following a kosher diet.
“There’s different levels of being kosher,” Novack said. “I’ll eat in the caf, it’s kind of like halal, where everything has to be certified beforehand. I’ll eat vegetarian-style when I’m out, but meats and those sorts of products have to be kosher.”
Novack said the kosher sandwich option offered in the Unicentre food court is expensive and inconvenient for students.
“We’ve moved that into the cafeteria so that residence [students] can have that option,” he said.
Novack also said that the kosher option is not one that is just for Jewish students.
“We looked at U.S. universities . . . in Penn State they have a whole kosher kitchen, and you see most of the demographic of people who eat there are not just Jewish — they are people who like the kosher dietary ways and they like what it stands for,” Novack said.
He said that having the kosher option was a “big step” for the cafeteria, but he hoped that the changes would continue.
“We’re starting small and working our way up to something that’s sustainable,” he said.
Hillel Ottawa student life co-ordinator Noah Borer voiced his support for Carleton’s new initiative.
“It’s definitely a step in the right direction,” he said. “Any student who keeps kosher on campus now doesn’t have to make the trip downtown to Rideau Bakery or to the kosher Loblaws.”
Borer explained that the fast-paced life of a student makes following kosher a challenge.
“In Ottawa there’s a small Jewish population – there’s only one kosher restaurant. There’s not much in the way of kosher food so it’s kind of a beautiful thing to have kosher food on campus,” he said.
Rabbi Chaim Boyarsky, director of the Chabad Student Network, agrees that this is an improvement.
“We’ve been working on this for the last year. We’re very happy that this went through, and we hope we’re going in the direction of having a full kosher kitchen. This is a start and we don’t want it to stop here,” he said.
