“Not long ago, there was only one sandwich without meat, made with cheese and butter, I also often found myself having pasta in oil and when it’s meat and fries, if I want to eat , I have to take a plate of fries, ”says Pablo Patat, vegetarian and engineering student at the National School of Materials, Food and Chemistry in Pessac, in the Bordeaux metropolis.
Like 75 academics and seven student associations in Bordeaux, he does not want to settle for such food monotony. He is a spokesperson from a grandstand which starts from the observation that “it is difficult today to have access to a balanced vegetarian diet in Crous : not all university restaurants offer a daily vegetarian option, and when it does exist, it is not sufficiently highlighted and worked on. »
Lack of attractiveness of dishes
The law which obliges university restaurants to offer a daily vegetarian option was passed in August 2021 but to give structures time to adapt, it came into force in January 2023. However, the menus are not really to the taste of plant enthusiasts who are getting impatient. The climate emergency imposes a revegetation of food, in particular to reduce its carbon footprint.
“There is an error of assessment on the part of these signatories, estimates Pascal Mergui, catering technical adviser at Crous de Bordeaux, which serves 15,000 meals on average in the metropolis. We have been offering a vegetarian option since 2019, as part of Green Monday, so we were well ahead of the law. And very quickly, we put a vegetarian option a day in each of our restaurants. He also highlights the success of the vegetarian jars, made available to students in the Crous Markets, which offer take-out sales. However, he quickly recognizes that there are still efforts to be made to provide more variety in the proposals: “We are going to refine our recipes to be more attractive and more standard, it is true that sometimes vegetable proteins are lacking. »
The Bordeaux catering service defends itself by saying that certain dishes remain on its hands. We know, for example, that fields where boys are in the majority (science or sport) are very few fans of vegetarian dishes, whereas they are very successful among medical students, for example. Hence a certain difficulty in anticipating a volume of vegetarian dishes. “It’s true that there are vegetarians in spite of themselves, if I may say so, at the end of the service if only these dishes remain and, on the contrary, we can run out of them from 12:30 p.m.”, notes Pascal Mergui .
A need for team training
“About 75% respect this obligation of daily vegetarian option, completes Keyvan Mostafavi, in charge of greening campaigns at Vegetable Plates, an association which notably offers training in collective catering. Most have a worked option that is tasteful and made to appeal to students. It is perhaps on this last aspect that the shoe pinches for the Crous de Bordeaux.
In the kitchen, the Crous staff have been trained to cook mainly meat and its accompaniment and find themselves a little taken aback. Nearly 70 vegetarian recipe sheets have been made available by the Cnous, and booklets published to raise awareness, but not all of them have yet been trained. “It is not enough to remove meat for it to become a vegetarian dish, supports Pascal Mergui. A correct alliance between legumes and cereals is necessary for it to be nutritious enough for those who never eat meat. »
However, if cooking raw vegetarian products costs “around 25% less” than their meat equivalents, the products have to be worked more (washing, cutting, soaking legumes, etc.) Training is planned for chefs and seconds (around twenty people) of the Crous of Bordeaux Métropole. “We are aware of the issues and we have not remained with our hands crossed until then”, tries to summarize Pascal Mergui.
Student support is needed
To listen to Vegetable plates, there is no magic recipe. “The Crous where things work well, it’s where the teams took up the subject, where they spoke to students to see which vegetarian dishes they liked, who trained their teams and who organize activities around vegetarian dishes. , underlines Keyvan Mostafavi. It is a global dynamic. For Pablo Patat, the forum is also an opportunity to reach out to the Crous to tell him that the student associations are at his disposal if he wishes to better know their needs, their desires.
When vegetarian dishes are mouth-watering, they seduce beyond pure vegetarians. “In Rennes, the largest French Crous in number of meals, 50% choose the vegetarian dish and in Grenoble, they are 25%. These structures have taken the lead for several years, ”points out Keyvan Mostafavi. It is only 10 to 20% in Bordeaux, which is called upon to work twice as hard.