Farmers Fridges: a placating project
Photo courtesy of William Farrington of the New York Post
Recently, Hofstra University added two Farmer’s Fridge vending machines to campus, one in Breslin Hall and another in the Netherlands, in an attempt to supply more healthy food on campus. While it is a nice gesture, it feels pacifying.
Hofstra students have been frequently asking for more convenient, plentiful and affordable healthy meal options, and these fridges are not the solution. They do provide the benefit of a healthier vending machine option, but in no way have they fulfilled the desire for healthier meals and dining on campus.
The Farmer’s Fridges are open 24/7, which would allow for a quick, convenient and healthy option at all hours of the day. While it is true these machines can be accessed at any time, for students in any residence hall other than the Netherlands, the Farmer’s Fridges are not as accessible as other places. If coming from their dorms, students must travel across campus to either location, making the fridges inconvenient at later hours.
While potentially beneficial for commuters, the placement of one of the fridges in Breslin is still nonsensical, as the building houses classrooms and is not one in which students are regularly eating.
Instead of placing a Farmer’s Fridge in such an inopportune location, one of the machines could have been placed in the Student Center, an easily reachable location with far more foot traffic and places to sit and eat. The Student Center is not out of the way like Breslin is, especially for students with no classes nearby.
Perhaps there would be more incentive to trek to these fridges and defend them if students could use their meal points to purchase the food. Instead, the only way to purchase from the Farmer’s Fridges is with a debit or credit card, similar to other vending machines on campus.
While it is insulting that what was advertised as the most convenient option must be purchased out of pocket, it could perhaps still be justifiable if it were affordable. Instead, the cheapest salad option is $9.49 and the most expensive one is $10.99, both of which exceed the price of create-your-own salads at other dining locations such as Dutch Treats and Bits & Bytes.
Not that the rest of the few healthy selections Hofstra dining provides are necessarily affordable either – while cheaper than the pre-packaged salads in the fridges, the baseline price for a create-your-own salad at Dutch is $8.55.
The options in the Farmer’s Fridges are limited as well. There are new snack options like chia pudding, wraps and bowls, but those choices are too small to constitute a full meal. The only true meal options in the machine are salads, which students can already obtain at several other locations on campus at a lesser cost while using pre-paid meal points.
The food in the fridges, as stated on the Farmer’s Fridge website, stays fresh for approximately four to five days after delivery. While some of the “enjoy by” dates are slightly longer than this narrow time frame, this does not change the fact that if students are not regularly ordering from these machines and keeping up with the weekly cycling of products, there will be a large amount of unnecessary food waste. There is a slot in which old containers can be recycled, but this is only after purchase and consumption.
Hofstra is not truly listening to the student body. The Farmer’s Fridges do provide a quicker and healthier option than some other campus dining locations, but for many students, these machines are just too costly and inconvenient to bother with.
The fridges have potential, but they aren’t what students have been asking for. Students want healthy meal options alongside other campus dining, not an entirely separate appliance with high cost and minimal reward.
