Students’ Quarantine Meals Are Going Viral on TikTok

To say the coronavirus pandemic has upended life as students know it would be an understatement. From crowded hallways serving as possible contagion vectors to uncertain futures triggered by job losses and lack of WiFi access, countless young people are being tasked with navigating hurdles that go beyond conjugating irregular verbs or remembering the difference between sine and cosine. Now, some students who are undertaking extraordinary measures to maintain as “normal” a school experience as possible are dealing with a new challenge: tragic quarantine meals.

Over the weekend, students at New York City’s New York University (NYU) began posting TikTok videos of their NYU-issued meals while in a mandatory 14-day quarantine, Eater reported. According to the school’s website, students who have traveled from certain states where coronavirus cases are still spiking are required to enter quarantine before attending classes in person; they must take two COVID-19 tests, and are only allowed to leave their dorm rooms for limited medical reasons. The school promised to provide three daily meals and a snack. The videos showed, however, that the school was ill-equipped to provide adequate meals to its 2,600 quarantined students.

As Eater noted, the videos showed “prepackaged salads, granola bars, pieces of fruit, and bags of potato chips”; students also kept track of “meals that arrived hours late, meals that never arrived, of eating breakfast for dinner, and eating leftover dinner for breakfast.”

One student, 18-year-old Madison Veldman, recorded a “smell test” of her carb-heavy meal, which consisted of a plain bagel, a chocolate croissant, grape juice, and one of her “three waters a day.” (She later posted an update that the school had delivered a case of water.)

Another freshman, named Benji, recorded a riff on the viral “things that just make sense” format, unboxing what was supposed to be a vegan meal option. There was one major problem: The school had delivered a steak salad with cheese. In a follow-up video that remarked on the viral status of his first post, Benji noted that the school was going to issue $100 gift cards so students could order their own food, which the school confirmed in a Facebook post.

A third student, named Lauren, chronicled a few days’ worth of meals, including a now-infamous salad that contained cubes of watermelon and chicken, and a mislabeled box that was supposed to contain a “breakfast BLT” but instead held pastries, a banana, and a granola bar. “Very grateful they are giving me food but they were lacking a little on the protein,” Lauren wrote. In another video, the student called the mismanagement “kind of triggering” for those recovering from eating disorders.

In a statement issued on August 20, NYU’s senior vice president for public affairs and strategic communications, John Beckman, said the school is “aware of the students' complaints, which are valid,” and blamed “a never-before-tried operation for us and our food vendor, Chartwells” as the cause of error.

“It is vital to get it right, and we are disappointed in Chartwells's management of the quarantine meals process,” he added, before detailing plans to add more on-site kitchen staff and support for students in the dorms. “We recognize that when people are required to quarantine in their rooms by themselves, few things in the day are more important than looking forward to something nice to eat, so this is a particularly regrettable error, and a let-down for our students,” he said. “We are dismayed that this didn't go off as planned, we and Chartwells apologize to the students, and we are committed to correcting this promptly."

But as some NYU students told BuzzFeed News, the promised changes didn't come soon enough. So a number of quarantine-mates set up mutual aid funds and funneled Venmo donations toward the collective. Freshman Alexandra Mettler told BuzzFeed News, "People on TikTok felt bad and sent me some money on Venmo, which I used to order food for myself and my suite-mate. I am redistributing all the extra funds I receive to other students who are struggling."

Another student, Maxim Estevez-Curtis, started a community grocery Instagram to support quarantined classmates, the New York Times reported. But students told BuzzFeed News that their work should be seen as a response to the university’s inability to provide for its students, where attendance costs over $70,000 per year, including tuition, housing, books, and related fees. “Mutual aid only exists because the institutions that are supposed to support us in the first place have failed," Noa Baron, a co-creator of a mutual aid group, told BuzzFeed News. "NYU promised its students who live in housing meals, and they failed."

The @RAVoicesNYU account has also been providing resources to students in need — and holding the school accountable for the treatment of its students. “NO STUDENT should be experiencing food insecurity by the hands of this university,” the account’s moderators wrote in a caption. “This is disturbing and we demand a solution to this immediately. This is especially of concern for low-income students who do not have the funds to afford meal deliveries for 14 days and for students with underlying medical conditions that require them to have regular access to substantial meals.” Teen Vogue has reached out to NYU and Chartwells for comment.

NYU isn’t the only school where students aren’t getting adequate meals. As the New York Times reported, a University of Georgia UGA student, William O’Bannon, documented the long line into the dining hall, the hall's meager offerings, and noted that the meal plan costs over $2,000 per semester. The school, based in Athens, Georgia, has since issued a statement outlining adjustments they’ve made since complaints surfaced. At Colorado College in Colorado Springs, some quarantined students were worried about the heat in their non-air conditioned dorms, Colorado Public Radio reported. The school has since devised guidelines for the students to get fresh air at least once a day. Other schools were forced to abruptly shut down in-person learning altogether after outbreaks were reported on campus. (A spokesperson for UGA pointed Teen Vogue to their recent announcements of expanded dining hall hours and food options, while a Colorado College spokesperson said in an email that every student was provided with a fan and can request air conditioning units.)\

According to a 2019 national survey of college students by the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice, 39% of respondents said they were food insecure, and an even larger number said they were housing insecure. College activists have already been fighting for the dignity of these students, many of whom have accrued seemingly insurmountable levels of student debt to afford enrollment to begin with. The coronavirus pandemic has added a new layer to the complexity of student needs, and as Dr. Grace Kao, a professor of sociology at Yale University, previously told Teen Vogue, “people in the most precarious situations, like first-generation students and first-generation Americans” are often forced to navigate the first and worst ramifications of global crises like the pandemic, the impact of which has already been felt by college students across the country. In a separate study, conducted between April 20 and May 15, three out of five student respondents told the Hope Center that they were experiencing basic-needs insecurity, which includes food insecurity.

Nutrition concerns have also been acute among younger students. Earlier this year, many public school districts felt compelled to stay open as long as they could so students would have guaranteed access to meals, EdWeek reported in March. This was viewed as a choice between two evils: Either stay open and risk worsening the spread among students of a highly communicable disease, or potentially leave millions of young people in the lurch. “Almost 30 million kids a day rely on government subsidized school meals,” Hunger Free America’s chief executive officer, Joel Berg, then told the outlet. “If schools are shut down for weeks at a time, we’re going to have a serious child hunger crisis.” After shutting down, schools nationwide used buses to deliver food to students in need; in New York, city workers set up food pick-up areas at empty schools.

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