Nearly 125 students gathered online Thursday for a town hall webinar with Residential & Dining Enterprises (R&DE) to ask questions on topics ranging from a report on plastic chemicals in Stanford’s food supply to recent videos of rats in University dining halls.
The Undergraduate Senate (UGS) hosted the town hall discussion, selecting questions from over 300 inquiries submitted by students prior to the event and moderating a live Q&A session with students and R&DE staff.
Addressing a recent report by PlasticList that detected the highest level of DEHA, a chemical used to create plasticity in materials, at Stanford dining out of over 300 Bay Area foods sampled, Assistant Vice Provost of Stanford Dining, Hospitality and Auxiliaries (SDHA) Eric Montell said that SDHA has partnered with Stanford’s Environmental Health and Safety (EH&S) to “review and try to reproduce” the results of the PlasticList report.
He called “plastic pollution” a “serious pervasive threat” throughout “the entire food system” that “not one single organization can address alone.”
Ivy Chen ’26 and Gordon Allen ’26, UGS co-chairs and moderators of the town hall, told The Daily before the event that UGS planned the town hall “on behalf of students” to “make sure their concerns are being raised” and to take a “first step” toward “meaningful change.”
“We want to ensure that this is actually coming from a student perspective, that this is answering a student concern, and not an R&DE narrative, R&DE story, R&DE concern,” Chen told The Daily.
At the meeting, Chen and Allen voiced their concerns over the PlasticList report, along with students and contributors.
“What specific protocols are the food preparers now instructed to follow to avoid adding more plastic to the food students are being mandated to buy and ingest?” an anonymous event attendee asked. “Has anything been done or do you think the problem was totally created prior?”
Montell assured attendees that “we are absolutely not putting plastic in the food. There’s nothing in our process that’s introducing plastic into food.” He also questioned the validity of the study.
“If you look at what they did in their research methodology, they put it in a plastic bag and then tested it for plastic,” Montell said.
Montell also addressed recent videos on Fizz of rats at Lakeside Dining, as well as a video that Philippe Clark ’27 shared of what he believed to be rat droppings behind a waffle maker at Lakeside Dining.
“We heard there were rodent droppings inside the dining hall. We went right away to look at it and investigate. It turns out it was actually burnt crumbs from the waffle machine,” Montell said.
Mike VanFossen, Assistant Vice Provost at R&DE, responsible for maintenance operations and capital projects, acknowledged that “a population increase of rodents” has become a “statewide issue” after California’s Poison-Free Wildlife Act, which bans certain forms of rat poison, passed in September. VanFossen said that R&DE “immediately hired a consultant” to “actively review” the more than 300 facilities that R&DE manages.
“We understand the instance mentioned at Lakeside Dining was a result of a propped door that invited the creature in. The rodent was then swiftly captured by our third-party vendor,” VanFossen said. “This is a shared responsibility for all staff and residents to keep doors and window screens closed.”
Students also expressed dissatisfaction over discrepancies in food variety and quality across dining halls. “The quality of food varies greatly from one dining hall to the next,” Juliana Lamm-Perez ’25 said. “Why is it that if I live in FloMo, my peers and I have much lower quality dining than our other peers across campus?”
“We understand that menu fatigue can happen over time,” said Michael Brewster, executive chef at Arrillaga Family Dining Commons. “We’ve expanded our cultural celebration dinners to span not just one week, but now up to four weeks. We’ve also introduced weekly chef tables at all locations and extended our core menu rotation from three weeks last year to five weeks this year.”
Chen questioned the R&DE panel on the cost of student meal plans. This year, the student meal plan costs $7,725, compared to $7,325 last year.
“Why does Stanford not provide a transparent breakdown when it comes to meal plan costs? Where is the money being allocated?” she asked.
Montell said that meal plan costs help cover “capital projects,” “major renovations,” “kitchen equipment” and “cost of labor,” and that R&DE operates other businesses including “catering, cafes and concessions” to help “offset student expenses.”
Montell added that “the missed meal factor is part of keeping that cost lower” for students. “If students ate 100% of their meals, the cost of the meal plan would actually have to be higher,” he said.
“We are not for profit,” Montell said. “I think sometimes that gets misunderstood by students.”