How COVID Changed Eating Habits
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — More than two dozen students squeezed into line in Redifer Commons, waiting to order custom burritos, bowls, quesadillas and nachos from Fresco y Caliente. It was 6 p.m. on a Sunday night, and the dining hall was filled with students crowding over tables, chatting and laughing as they ate.
In line, some students talked while others scrolled through their phones, each about 2 feet apart. None of them wore masks.
The dining hall employees quickly took orders, mixed ingredients and moved students through the line. One employee wore two masks, another wore a single mask and the other five were maskless.
One month ago, Redifer Commons was a completely different scene. Everyone had been required to wear masks indoors unless they were eating, and students had generally maintained social distancing while in lines.
Attitudes and policies around food consumption changed rapidly and dramatically throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Students on and off campus made dining decisions that completely veered from the predictable patterns they followed before.
As COVID cases decrease, some students are once again changing the ways they have been eating over the past two years.
Eating Off-Campus
The majority of students at University Park live off-campus, and many adjusted their eating habits to stay safe during the pandemic.
Catherine Heffernan, a sophomore studying advertising, lives in an apartment in downtown State College. She explained that during the height of the pandemic, she preferred to order food for delivery over interacting with the public in grocery stores.
“When I didn’t know much about COVID, I didn’t want to go out and get it,” she said. “People would also buy a lot of items at once at grocery stores and wipe them out. It happened to random things, like my favorite yogurt.”
Now that COVID cases are declining, Heffernan said she goes to the grocery store and makes a lot of her own meals.
At supermarkets, there were shortages of more than just yogurt. Blaine Egan, a Penn State student who has worked at Weis Markets since 2019, watched the store’s policies transform throughout the past two years.
“We had to put limits on everything, not just toilet paper,” he said. “We had to limit eggs, milk, bread and bread products like bagels and donuts because people were buying in so much bulk. People were also buying aluminum cans, and it got to the point where we didn’t have aluminum cans in stores for weeks. Oh my gosh, it was insane.”
During the first year of COVID, Weis employees were required to wear masks, get their temperatures taken, wash their hands hourly and stand behind a plexiglass shield. Egan said that it was easy to enforce the requirements among employees, but it was difficult to make customers follow COVID guidelines.
“A lot of minors work here, and we didn’t feel comfortable having 17-year-olds walk up to adults and force them to put a mask on,” he said.
The inability to enforce masking guidelines led the store to state that masks were “highly recommended.” Egan said that nearly every customer wore a mask at the start of the pandemic. Now, only a few customers wear a face covering.
While Heffernan preferred to order food, not every student avoided the grocery store because of COVID. Rachel Fedorko, a junior living in an apartment, said she was able to buy the same groceries as she did before the pandemic, and even tried some healthier options.
However, Fedorko did avoid going to restaurants in fear of catching COVID-19, but said she got “cabin fever” and has been going out to eat recently.
“There’s a lot more interaction with random people you see at restaurants,” she said. “I think people are more excited to talk to you after COVID because they haven’t talked to other people for so long.”
As more students are getting comfortable with going out to eat, restaurants in downtown State College are becoming less restrictive after two years of uncertainty.
Curtis Shulman, the director of operations for Hotel State College for nine years, described consumers’ dining habits throughout the pandemic as a “wild pattern.” Hotel State College includes The Corner Room, the Allen Street Grille, Bill Pickle’s Tap Room, Chumley’s Cocktail Bar, The Basement Nightspot and Zeno’s Pub.
As the information and regulations surrounding COVID continued to update throughout the pandemic, Hotel State College had to make changes to operations regularly.
“Every week, we had to find a way to open our doors and make sure our staff had the ability to make money,” Shulman said. “We took the information we had and tried to do the best we could.”
After two years of masking, shut-downs and other restrictions, the only change that remains on consumers’ end is lower capacity in restaurants because the staff can not physically handle as much as before. However, consumer patterns have not returned to what they were before COVID.
“On the weekends when people aren’t working, we’re thriving,” Shulman said. “The bar scene is out of control. The restaurants are full. Then, mid-week when a lot of regulars and locals would come out, they still aren’t comfortable entering downtown yet. It’s interesting how the mid-week crowds have drastically reduced but the weekends have increased tenfold.”
Shulman said that Hotel State College is looking forward to eventually seeing the consumers that have not been comfortable going to restaurants, but he does not know if the fear around going out to restaurants will completely go away.
“If you were to come to me before the pandemic, I could give you a forecast of our sales for every day of the week for every day of the semester,” Shulman said. “As we come out of that, those rhythms are lost and people’s habits have changed.”
On-Campus Dining
While many students turn to grocery stores and restaurants for meals, over 14,000 students live on campus at University Park and have access to dining halls for every meal of the day. Many more on-campus dining options are operating this year compared to the 2020–2021 academic year.
Olivia Lindberg, a sophomore studying biostatistics, has lived on campus the past two years but said that she ate off campus a lot more last year. She said that this year, students seem much “happier” in the dining halls.
“People are less isolated, and they aren’t afraid to hang out with their friends,” she said. “It’s better energy.”
Students have also changed their dining habits based on the increased food options on campus.
Jimmy Wert, a sophomore studying material science and engineering, said that he usually got the buffet food and quickly left the dining halls last year.
“There’s so many more options this year,” Wert said. “I get the buffet less than I did before.”
Penn State Food Services declined to comment about how COVID affected on-campus dining.
Many students also utilize the Lion’s Pantry, Penn State’s official on-campus student food pantry. The Lion’s Pantry is open six days a week and is free to any student with a valid Penn State ID.
William Li, a senior studying mathematics and minoring in anthropology, has volunteered with the Pantry since his freshman year and is now the Pantry director.
“We saw that COVID shut down a lot of student groups,” he said. “But with the Lion’s Pantry and because of the nature of our organization, we really hit the gas when COVID came around.”
The Lion’s Pantry began offering more pre-packed food and deliveries once the pandemic began, and it stopped accepting food donations to limit possible contamination. Instead, the Pantry used private donations, an endowment from the 2017 Class Gift, and funding from Tackle Hunger to purchase food to distribute.
“COVID exacerbated the issue we face here,” Li said. “In the past, we had more money than we knew what to do with. That’s now changing, in part because of the continually increasing and sustained demand.”
Li suggested that the growing use of the Lion’s Pantry is due to both COVID and increasing visibility of the service. The Lion’s Pantry volunteers are now looking at alternative sources of funding, such as the Student Fee Board, to ensure that they can continue offering support to students.
“Food insecurity is very much an invisible issue, and it’s much more prevalent than a lot of us want to think or even know that it is,” Li said. “We are not looking at hunger and destitution on the level of ragged shoes and dirty faces. We are looking at typical students that are experiencing this issue.”
According to a survey by the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice, 33% of 4-year college students experience some level of food insecurity, and 19% experience very low security.
“Students say that they don’t deserve to take advantage of this resource, or that they aren’t on that level yet,” Li said. “But the message is really that all students should have access to nutritious, appropriate and sufficient amounts of food.”
