Students petted baby goats, ate vegan foods and listened to music in celebration of sustainability on Wednesday.
LSU dining hosted Grateful for Spring, an event meant to celebrate and promote plant-based, sustainable foods for students to eat during Earth Month. The event attracted crowds of students to the various vendors.
The event was put on by Chartwells Higher Education Dining, the company that handles all of LSU’s dining needs. They partnered with Campus Life and Facility Services. 
The event had several vendors serving plant-based foods, including pizza, meatballs, pasta and churros. There was also a petting zoo with baby animals, a photobooth, face-painting and a flowerpot creation station.
The event also had a “Thankful Wall” for students to write what they are grateful for and what they can do to be more environmentally sustainable in their daily lives. Chartwells CEO Lisa McEuen said that they include the wall at each of the Joyful Series events.
The recent event was the fourth installment in a series of events Chartwells has been hosting across hundreds of college campuses called the Joyful Series. McEuen said the Joyful Series was created to celebrate community in response to the COVID-19 Pandemic harming student’s ability to interact socially.
Senior marketing director Eric Rouse said that the Grateful for Spring event was organized to educate students on ways to reduce food waste and to provide students with a greater sense of community. He said that overall, plant-based foods are better for the environment.
“Basically, our mission today is to celebrate Stop Food Waste Day. That’s why we offered a vegan, plant-based menu today for students just to introduce them to that cuisine,” Rouse said.
Senior executive chef Jon Jackson said all of the items offered at the event are offered in the LSU dining halls. He also said that they plan to continue hosting events from the Joyful Series in the future.
“Basically, it’s a post-COVID, kind of, ‘get back to normalcy’ kind of event,” Jackson said. “This event is a celebration of Earth Day. Basically, we’re trying to feature sustainable products, sustainable zero-waste containers, plant-based foods that we’re serving out here today, things that go with our company mission.”
Jackson said that although plant-based foods are a little expensive, the price is going down as demand for them increases.
McEuen said that Chartwells hosted similar events across the roughly 300 universities that they service across the country. She said that each of the events had some sort of a giveback associated with it. For the Grateful for Spring Event, they gave the leftover food to a local homeless shelter.
“Students are a lot more…not so much in groups anymore and they spent a lot of alone time in COVID, so I think this is a way to bring people back together through food,” McEuen said.
McEuen said they are planning four more events, two in the fall and two next spring.