The university has plans to start serving vegetarian lunches by default during meetings, instead of always including meat sandwiches. Radboud Green Office hopes to go even further and work towards 'vegan by default'.

Sander van der Goes, of student faction AKKUraatd, and Arnoud Lagendijk, of employee faction VAWO, had heard that the executive board wants to follow Utrecht University and Erasmus University Rotterdam in serving vegetarian lunches as a standard option. During the university’s General Meeting they asked about the status of those plans.

Chairman of the board Daniel Wigboldus answered jokingly that the lunch during the board’s meetings is already vegetarian. ‘But that is probably not what you are asking about’, he continued. ‘The meeting lunches are getting more and more vegetarian within the university. Facilities & Services has noticed a rise in demand for this.’

Wigboldus said that, following the example of other universities, Radboud University will start serving vegetarian lunches by default at the start of the next academic year, at the latest. ‘It takes some time to choose a product range and that’s why we will not start until next academic year’, he says. ‘We are working on it.’

Vegetables
In the meantime, other initiatives around meeting lunches have emerged. During the ‘Proeftuin Duurzaamheid, a Green Office initiative in which students, employees and alumni are asked for ideas on sustainability, a plan called ‘vegan by default’ has been honoured. According to this plan, lunches would even have to be completely plant-based, unless the person who orders the lunch asks for something else.

In both cases, this does not mean that there will not be any meat or other animal products available, but it has to be specially asked for.