Photos by Tara Monastesse ’25
Blanch’s Harvest station often has a preponderance of vegan options and few non-vegan choices, leaving some non-vegans feeling underrepresented.
Dela Dzimega ’28
Staff Writer
If you check the Harvest or M&Cs sections of the Dining Commons menu, you’ll realize that most of Mount Holyoke College's desserts are vegan. From cookies and cakes to even brownies, most desserts are made without animal products, likely in an effort to be inclusive of all students’ dietary needs and restrictions. Despite the College's valuable effort to create dietary inclusivity, certain aspects of the food cannot be replicated through a vegan recipe. Eliminating ingredients such as butter, eggs and milk fundamentally changes the texture and flavor of most baked goods. As such, completely ignoring other options affects the enjoyability of desserts for all students. To balance this issue, the College should keep offering vegan desserts, but provide more non-vegan options alongside them.
Some may ask, “What makes non-vegan desserts important to the students when vegan options are available?” Eggs, butter and milk are fundamental to baking for a reason. Take a classic chocolate chip cookie, for example. Eggs combine with sugar to provide a perfect blend of crunch and chewiness. Then, butter provides saltiness, moisture and a rich complexity to the cookie's flavor. Even the melty chocolate chips usually contain milk. Regardless of what dessert you're baking, non-vegan products like eggs, butter and milk are essential in the consistency of baked goods. Whipped eggs create a light airiness for cakes, milk prevents dryness, butter is responsible for flakey pie crusts and dairy can be found in many popular frostings like buttercream, cream cheese and whipped cream. A chocolate chip cookie, like many other desserts, certainly can be made vegan, but loses many of its desirable qualities when ingredients are replaced.
While there isn’t public data on Mount Holyoke students’ dietary habits, Gallup’s latest Consumption Habits Poll reports that, as of 2023, only 1% of Americans are vegan. Though it is a small percentage, this is still millions of people. Additionally, vegan desserts are also accessible for people who have restrictions with dairy and eggs for other reasons, like lactose intolerance. Considering these factors, it is clear vegan options should not be removed entirely from the menu because they benefit a substantial chunk of our student body.
With this being said, in order for the College to accurately represent the entire student body, our desserts don’t have to be exclusively vegan. As I described earlier, there is a trade off to the all-or-nothing way the College is currently handling this. To truly represent the College’s needs, vegan desserts should be one option of many. M&Cs, one of our school’s oldest traditions, could be more popular with other options. If the school offered a more balanced mix of vegan and non-vegan options, it would inevitably achieve its goal of creating a dietary friendly menu while also remaining inclusive to all students, including those without certain dietary restrictions.
Leah Dutcher ’28 contributed fact-checking.