When Isabel Carr (CAS ’26) was a freshman at Georgetown, eating at Leo J. O’Donovan Dining Hall sent her to the hospital twice.
Tree nuts, milk, and eggs can cause Carr to go into anaphylactic shock, so she spent most of her time eating at Plant Power and True Balance, the vegetarian and allergen-safe dining stations.
During Carr’s first year, Georgetown’s dietician had pointed to the allergy-specific station as a safe place and emphasized that the entirety of Leo’s was tree-nut and peanut free. Carr felt comfortable that the choices she had were safe.
However, one morning, an hour after eating breakfast, Carr found herself in class sweaty, itchy, and swollen.
“I started having a full-blown allergic reaction, and people didn’t know what to do—I was losing consciousness,” Carr said.
After Carr excused herself from class, her friend called GERMS, and she gave herself an EpiPen. The pair spent the rest of the day in the hospital.
After a second incident led to another hospitalization, she applied for accommodations and got a reduced meal plan, among other adjustments.
Carr is one of many Georgetown students who struggle with eating on campus due to their dietary restrictions. Students who are vegetarian, follow kosher or halal, or have allergies or intolerances said that they run into daily obstacles as they look for food they can eat.
Dining at Georgetown is currently managed by Aramark, a food services company that serves over 275 colleges and universities. Aramark manages all meal options on campus, including Leo’s, Epicurean, Royal Jacket, and Crop Chop. Georgetown’s current contract with Aramark is set to expire in 2027 and a university spokesperson wrote to the Voice that they are “currently conducting a Request-for-Proposal (RFP) process to solicit proposals from food service providers for moving forward after the expiration.”
In light of the impending contract expiration, many students with restrictions have called on Georgetown not to pursue a renewal with Aramark.
“For how much money that we pay to go here, it is really disappointing that Georgetown is unable to accommodate,” Fatima Anjum (CAS ’28) said. “Confining students to one station where the food is bad, I don’t understand how the university does not see that that is inaccessible.”
Anjum is a student with celiac disease, a condition that causes one’s immune system to treat gluten as a threat and attack their intestines after consumption. Though Anjum has been able to navigate eating on campus with celiac with no hospitalizations, there are only a few guaranteed safe spaces to eat.
Since being diagnosed with the condition in sixth grade, Anjum has not eaten gluten—until this year at Georgetown.
Although she mainly cooks, between classes, Anjum sometimes finds herself in a rush and goes to the dining hall for lunch. Earlier this year, she decided to eat tacos from the Halal station at Leo’s—not an exclusively gluten-free location, but all the ingredients that day were labeled as gluten-free.
After she sat down, Anjum said her intuition told her something was off. After taking a few bites, she realized the tortilla was labeled wrong. It was not a corn tortilla, but flour.
“I know that I was taking a risk by eating at another station, but I was taking a risk of cross-contamination, not a risk of literally consuming flour,” Anjum said.
Anjum ended up sick for two weeks after consuming those two bites of gluten. Although she did not need to go to the hospital, most of her time was spent in bed, missing class.
Since the incident, Anjum has attended Dining Committee meetings, monthly conversations held by GUSA between students and Hoya Hospitality administration.
When she brought up the challenges of restricted eating, Hoya Hospitality administrators told Anjum she needed accommodations to address her specific dietary needs. Currently, those accommodations ensure Anjum has her own kitchen.
“If [students] have to constantly be cooking in their own apartment, that takes away that time where it’s for socializing, where people would decompress at the end of a nice day at Leo’s,” Anjum said.
At the same time, she is still required to have a partial meal plan, meaning that she is paying for both groceries and dining hall food that she often can’t eat.
Anjum pointed to other schools, such as UMass Amherst, that provide their gluten-free students with more options. At Leo’s, Anjum has to eat dairy-free and egg-free, although she is only allergic to gluten.
“As much as I think that they try to say that there are options, it’s a clear equity issue,” Anjum said. “Georgetown really shoves it in their face that their chronic illness is theirs and it is their problem.”
Dining Committee member Sienna Lipton (CAS ’27) has also had difficulties getting accommodations for her celiac disease. She attempted to get off the meal plan that has been required for all students living on campus since 2021. Currently, she has a 7-weekly plan that she usually uses to get coffee in the morning rather than for actual meals.
“Last year, they made me do 14-weekly, and that felt like too much,” Lipton said. “I actually remembered challenging them, and they were like, ‘That’s just the lowest we can do for sophomores. Sorry.”
In a comment to the Voice, a university spokesperson said that the Academic Resource Center, which makes accommodations for students with disabilities, has an individualized process that takes into account the specifics of each request made.
Last semester, through the Dining Committee, Georgetown opened a new Stress Less Zone in Leo’s that offers more options to gluten-free students, such as a fridge with gluten-free food. Lipton believes it is a start, but that conversations about accommodating students at committee meetings are mostly circular.
Lipton also pointed to employee turnover at the administrative level at Hoya Hospitality as another cause for concern. In the past year, the manager of dining at Georgetown and the dietician roles have both been replaced, which caused stations at Leo’s to have irregular schedules.
“I really have not seen the progress I would really like to,” Lipton said. “The conversation has kind of shifted from ‘How do we accommodate students?’ to ‘Okay, how do we let students not be on the meal plan?’ Because clearly we don’t have the capacity to accommodate students’ dietary restrictions.”
In a comment to the Voice, a university spokesperson said that the university is committed to providing students with healthy, fresh, and nutritious meals.
“The University can meet the vast majority of students’ dining needs—including disability-related or religious dietary requirements—through its extensive dining options, or through reasonable accommodations,” the spokesperson wrote.
Not only have students with allergy restrictions expressed difficulties eating on campus and receiving accommodations, but students with religious restrictions have faced similar challenges.
Maahir Kasliwal (SFS ’28) is Jain. As part of the non-violent religious practices, Kasliwal is restricted in what he eats. He does not eat meat and certain vegetables, such as root vegetables like onions or potatoes.
Freshman year, Kasliwal tried to eat at Leo’s Plant Power station, but he found the food to be highly processed and very repetitive.
Kasliwal explained that cross-contamination was a strong concern for his family. At restaurants, his parents would request their dishes be cooked separately. When he explained this concern to Hoya Hospitality, however, they told him there was only so much they could do.
“You’re forced to accept that there will be contamination from other utensils or dishes,” Kasliwal said. “So I just had to accept that and let go of my own cultural upbringing to eat the food that was available to me because it’s already such limited options.”
Kasliwal now has religious accommodations to reduce his meal plan and have access to a kitchen.
Other students with religious restrictions face similar limitations on campus. When student Michael Busch (SFS ’27) transferred to Georgetown from Rice University, he reached out to Hoya Hospitality and was assured he would be able to maintain his Kosher diet.
But since transferring, Busch found the kosher options slim.
Leo’s only offers kosher hot dinners Monday through Thursday at the Kosher Cart, a non-permanent space in Leo’s. For breakfast and lunch, they have a small fridge behind the salad bar with the same wraps and muffins every week.
Most of these options disappear quickly, Busch said, due to demand. As for other spaces on campus, Busch said that he often finds their kosher fridges empty.
Along with the majority of kosher options being cold, Busch said there have been multiple instances in which employees misunderstood what a kosher diet entails. Once, an employee gave Busch a chicken, bacon, and cheese burrito from the kosher fridge, an item that goes against the diet by mixing meat and cheese.
Now, Busch is completely off the meal plan, which required him to prove that Leo’s did not have adequate options and to coordinate his request with the campus rabbi. During this process, he said that the administration made him feel as though it was entirely his “responsibility and fault.”
“I feel that there’s a lack of sort of empathy in the administration and within the dining hall,” Busch said. “If all of the students that eat strictly kosher get exemptions, this is a sign that we need to change something, but I didn’t really get that impression.”
At Rice, Busch said they didn’t have any kosher-specific facilities on campus, but he was still able to have three guaranteed kosher meals a day through an app ordering process, which Busch says was a “very reliable” system.
“The food was definitely sufficient. I felt like it was a full meal,” he said.
Within the Washington D.C. area, Lipton described the accessibility she saw at American University, which recently switched from Aramark dining services to a different company in 2019. Students at American University cited concerns over a controversy with Aramark, but also advocated for an improvement in operation hours, food quality, and an increased diversity of food options for students with dietary restrictions.
Lipton described a recent visit to a friend at American, where she saw an “allergen room” that the university maintains to have a toaster and other supplies directly available to gluten-free students, rather than available on request, as Georgetown does.
On average, the meal plans at Georgetown are over $500 dollars more expensive than those at American. However, the university dining services at American offer more options for students with restrictions, including two gluten-free stations.
For Muslim students at Georgetown, the university offers a halal-diet specific station at Leo’s. However, students have had to advocate for more clarity on what was halal elsewhere, according to Meriam Ahmad (SFS ’26), former chair of the Dining Committee.
“Coming to campus and realizing, ‘Oh, it’s not only the Halal station that’s halal. What else is halal?’” Ahmad said. “That was the real puzzle that I had to go through, because it’s very confusing when the university doesn’t label something as halal meat or non-halal.”
One tool students can look to is the Halal Guide, a document currently run by students like Ahmad. Students update the guide regularly, based on conversations with administration.
A university spokesman said in a comment to the Voice that Hoya Hospitality will begin labeling meat as Halal in spring 2026, after meeting with “members of Georgetown’s Muslim community to reach a common definition of halal.”
Ahmad said that these labels are important not only for students who follow halal to know what they can eat, but to show prospective students “that this is a university that supports Muslim students.”
Ahmad believes that some important progress has been made, but that Hoya Hospitality should “be upfront” about their limits, especially when it comes to what they can provide to students with restrictions. She also hopes they continue tracking student engagement.
Imam Yahya Hendi, the director for Muslim Life at Georgetown, explained that changes to the food accessibility, such as proper labeling, can only occur when students and administration work together.
“I don’t think I need to wish Aramark to take [more responsibility] because at the end of the day, they don’t know, they need to be educated, and it’s our role to educate them,” Hendi said. “I think it takes two to make one.”
The dietician on campus, Amanda Pierce, stressed accessibility “requires active communication and accountability with students.”
“We have feedback channels including QR codes on the tables, regular meetings with students for nutrition consultations, weekday availability at Leo’s, and regular meetings with the Student Dining Committee as well as other student groups so we can continuously improve offerings based on their experiences,” Pierce wrote in a comment to the Voice. “I believe we offer a diverse variety to accommodate needs such as halal, vegetarian, vegan, and allergy-friendly choices.”
Pierce wrote that her ultimate goal is “to create a dining environment where every student is safe, respected, and confident that their dietary needs will be safely met.”
Anjum, one of the students with celiac disease, believes that, although Georgetown works to navigate dining restrictions with stations like True Balance, “there is still so much inequity.” There are days when she “starves” on campus, Anjum said.
“Before coming to college, I really took for granted how much easier it was to just eat and go about my day,” she said. “There’s nothing worse than being at an academically rigorous institution and not eating.”
