The 5 dining hall is taking new steps to cater to students with food allergies.
A new station was developed in fall 2015 to cater to students with specific dietary needs due to allergies. The new station, titled Zone 8, targets the top eight major food allergens and does not use any of them when preparing meals.
The eight most common food allergens are peanuts, tree nuts, fish, seafood, eggs, milk, wheat and soy.
“Just through time, more and more students have been prone to different allergies,” said Charity Reeder, director of marketing for LSU Dining. “We see a lot more students that are allergic to different types of food, different types of seasonings or different things like that.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, food allergies affect 4 to 6 percent of children and 4 percent of adults. The aforementioned foods contribute to 90 percent of all food-related allergic reactions.
Food allergy reactions are described as “when your immune system overreacts to a food or a substance in a food, identifying it as a danger and triggering a protective response,” according to the American College of Allergy, Asthma, & Immunology. ACAAI also says reactions can occur in a range of severity, with the most severe type of reaction being anaphylaxis.
Anaphylaxis a life-threatening whole-body allergic reaction that can impair breathing, cause a dramatic drop in blood pressure and affect heart rate. Anaphylaxis can come on within minutes of exposure to the trigger food. It can be fatal and must be treated promptly with an injection of epinephrine, or adrenaline, according to ACAAI.
To avoid these reactions from happening, Zone 8 allows students to come up and speak to an associate about the station’s meal of the day, ask questions about the ingredients or talk to a registered dietician about special cases.
“Even if you don’t have those allergies, the food is still really good,” Reeder said.
Zone 8’s conception came from a rising concern from parents sending their students to college with a meal plan, but wondering if the meals would be suitable for their child.
“We meet up with the freshman during orientation, and that is when we first meet up with students and parents and talk about the meal plans,” Reeder said. “They will come up to us and say, ‘My child is allergic to this and that, what can you do to help them, or are they going to be able to eat on that meal plan with their different allergies?’ And that’s what we’ve seen more and more of.”
While Zone 8 is currently only an available station in The 5, the registered dietician works with The 459 as well, and students can set up a meeting to discuss their dietary needs.
“We want to make sure, even when students are on campus, they don’t feel like that they’re outcasts or have to go eat somewhere else just because they have a certain type of allergy,” Reeder said. “We will go over and beyond to do whatever we can do to make that student feel at home while they’re not at home.”