ND Dining weaponizes Lent with fake meat

The Thursday before break, Notre Dame showcased its new steak-free culinary option at South Dining Hall. The food-like substance was advertised as “Cow-Free Steak,” a 100% plant-based meat option with only six ingredients and 28 grams of protein per serving. It was then later disclosed that this vegan meat option would be regularly distributed for lunch and dinner upon our return from Spring Break. 

Land Lovers’ “Cow-Free Steak” is arriving at Notre Dame at a turning point for both American health standards and climate change concerns. The Trump administration’s position on American health and dieting has clearly shifted to a more naturally oriented position, as highlighted by the appointment of Health and Human Services director Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his opposition to highly processed foods and seed oils. Meanwhile, many climate activists and leading scientists argue that the mass production of bovine products and the excess methane produced by cows have led to substantial carbon emissions in the United States and abroad. 

Notre Dame’s decision to showcase both its mushroom meat and its cow-free steak sides with environmental concerns, which have become increasingly more potent as carbon emissions continue to rise in the United States. Vegan meat brands have also advertised their products as a healthier alternative to beef or poultry due to lower levels of cholesterol and saturated fats. Notre Dame’s decision to help popularize vegan meat options for the youth reveals its commitment to sustainability and its enforcement of popular health standards. 

As you can see, I have articulated this recent development as transparently as I could. I tried to make sure that there was no bias in my analysis. Unfortunately, this is Viewpoint, so I’m required to give my opinion on any issue I discuss. But now that the readers have a comprehensive understanding of what’s going on, I can rip into the fact that eating vegan meat is tantamount to consuming straight estrogen and that preventing climate change is not accomplished by simply not eating cows.

I’ll begin with a quick tangent. I asked one of the dining employees what exactly the six ingredients were. She quickly replied that the first two were wheat and soy. “Great,” I said. “So what are the other four?” 

After a long pause, she said she had no idea. So, I googled it. The ingredients are water, soy protein isolate, Soy Flour, Wheat Gluten, Canola Oil and Rice Starch (contains 2% or less of salt, corn starch, maltodextrin, yeast extract, dehydrated garlic, sugar, onion powder, potassium sorbate, red sorghum bran extract, natural flavor). First, I count more than six ingredients. Second, it’s fake meat filled with soy, which is estrogenic, food dyes and additives like maltodextrin, which are terrible for you in large quantities and most namely, seed oils, which cause serious bodily inflammation and chronic illness. Sounds really healthy to me!

But the best way to approach my hatred and vehement opposition to vegan meat is through incorporating its implementation into Notre Dame’s ineffective approach to achieving net-zero emissions. 

Notre Dame has promoted its goal to be net zero by 2050 in response to climate change. My investigation of the construction of new buildings on campus revealed an apparent misalignment between its stated goal and building practices. 

My repeated inquiries to key leaders on campus concerning their sustainable construction methods were left unanswered.  Most started with that pesky little word: how? 

For example, how are the buildings being constructed to achieve net zero? If they are not built to be net zero, how much carbon will the new buildings emit? 

It seems logical that if the carbon goal is numeric, then somebody should be counting. Yet, when asked how much carbon the new buildings will release, nobody in sustainability or construction leadership could produce a quantifiable answer. When pressed on carbon, key employees refused to do in-person interviews or answer questions directly. Instead, all subsequent inquiries were directed to the Notre Dame public relations (PR) department.

Before describing the challenges with the PR department, here is why an emphasis on buildings is needed. Buildings account for over 40% of climate change pollution. The EPA indicates that 43% of all energy is spent on buildings. This information spits in the face of the commonly held notion that “every little bit” counts in the fight against climate change. For example, what’s the use in serving fake, malnourished and unhealthy vegan meat to save carbon if South Dining Hall emits more carbon in a week than can be saved with 100 years of composting and cow-free production? 

Currently, 20% of the current energy demands are satisfied by renewable sources. But with such a high energy demand, Notre Dame will struggle to acquire all the renewable resources needed to hit 100%. Their current approach is to purchase renewable offsets to cancel out their excessive carbon output. This approach is costly and misguided when the University also has the ability to reduce the energy needs of the buildings. If the buildings need less energy, then the small amount of renewable sources we have could satisfy them, and we could all eat real steak and be happy and jacked again.

With the University's current heat load and energy demands, renewable sources will never be enough. The solution to climate change at Notre Dame, therefore, lies in building construction practices. It’s difficult, it’s demanding of expert planning, and it’s lacking at Notre Dame.  

The University has publicized its construction of LEED buildings in an effort to also publicize its commitment to sustainability. LEED represents a rating system that measures how sustainable and environmentally friendly a building is. While buildings with a LEED certification may appear to be impressive at first glance, the way in which this ranking is achieved corrodes its legitimacy. Buildings are given points for including more sustainability efforts. For example, according to the national LEED Standards, buildings are given more points if they also include bike racks and rain gardens. While both of those measures are nice, they create perverse incentives. Buildings with a LEED certification, then, can get away with emitting more carbon, as long as they have a bike rack or a pretty garden to cancel it out. 

I have reached out to many officials in both the sustainability and the energy departments at Notre Dame concerning their commitment to sustainability and their approach to efficient building practices. My conclusion is that the University of Notre Dame has a phenomenal public relations department. They gently evaded all specific questions that would have either revealed effective building details or exposed an abject failure in building practices to achieve carbon neutrality. When presented with a list of specific questions about the carbon output from buildings on campus, the public relations department spun it back without any answers yet made the inquirer feel silly for asking. The public relations department also protected University building professionals from participating in follow-up questions or permitting me on the job site. That’s poor PR if something needs to be celebrated, and that’s effective PR when something needs to be hidden.

In the end, the refusal to release and defend building practice details was a victory for the school and its image. It just seems contradictory for an academic institution to redirect those in search of the truth, regardless of how inconvenient it may be.

So why does this matter, and how does it relate to the repulsive soy-boy-tofu-beyond meat that’s all of a sudden cemented itself in our dining halls?

My conclusion is that Notre Dame doesn’t know how to reduce their carbon emissions in a way that actually brings them to net zero without the purchase of renewable offsets. And as a result, you’re stuck eating unhealthy fake meat because the University can’t solve harder problems. You are suffering the consequences of unkept promises and the idolization of public relations. They make little effort to ensure the maximum efficiency of their buildings through effective insulation practices, but boy, do they make sure to showcase their fake meat and force-feed it to a malnourished student body and show off their ‘green’ commitment!

Is that all fighting climate change is? Just a show of support? Is Notre Dame only going to do the little things right but ignore the major concerns just so they can look good? 

Notre Dame wants their visible commitments to be louder than the necessary actions which are required to achieve net-zero. Planting a solar field which will supply less than 1% of the University’s energy needs right next to the highway where all Notre Dame parents drop off their kids every year is certainly good marketing. But it’s misleading. 

Notre Dame wants you to know that when it comes to climate change, they do the little things well. They have tiny solar panel projects, they serve fake meat to reduce methane emissions, they even recycle! But when it comes to the larger issues that are seldom noticed by the public, like efficient building practices, Notre Dame remains clueless. Their desire for attention and favorable public relations suffocates their progress in achieving a net-zero campus by 2050. Focusing on the “little things” isn’t going to save an entire planet. Give us back our grass-fed steak.