Over the years, Mather Dining Hall has been a place Bantams dread eating at. All of us have met someone who has gotten severe food poisoning from Mather food, and the vast majority of us haven fallen ill ourselves. Most recently, students have gotten E. coli, gotten raw "hard boiled eggs" at Mather, and have gotten "normal" food poisoning (i.e., vomiting, diarrhea, and stomach cramping) from the food. Students on the default meal plan (which is 2.9k a semester, enough to finance dining off campus and eat edible food) have no option to use their swipes at The Bistro or The Cave, which are severely overpriced if you're paying with cash or debit card, only Mather. A student running an account called changechartwells recently also started bravely making demands after contracting E. coli at Mather, and by coincidence, we (who are making this petition) and several of our friends also got sick this week, causing us to miss class and hurt our academics. After we saw their post, and got sick after, we realized we needed to follow them by making demands of our own.

Forcing students to eat food that not only tastes bad, but makes your stomach do somersaults at best and leaves you with a life threatening illness at worst is inhumane, and money hungry, especially for a school with an endowment to make sure everyone is eating food that is healthy and tastes like food you would actually pay for. Time and time again, Chartwells has promised to make the food quality better, but they never do. It is time to stop giving them more chances. The only way Chartwells or Trinity will listen to our demands is if we hurt the one thing they care about: their pockets.

We are calling on students who are comfortable with doing the following to join us in:

1. Sending an email demanding to be taken off the meal plan for fear of health issues from Mather.
2. Going into Mather via the back door when people exit, rather than tapping your card, so Trinity and Chartwells do not make profit off of inedible food.
3. Signing this petition!

Now, the main objective of this petition, directed at Trinity College:

We are calling on you to break the contract with Chartwells Dining Services. Forcing students who cannot afford the 15 Flex Plan (the only plan sufficient to not have to eat at Mather Dining Hall) to eat at Mather and risk severe foodbourne illness, and all but definitely have at least general discomfort after every meal, is classist, greedy, and dangerous to our health. Time and time again, you have paid us lip service, claiming that Chartwells has promised to make the food quality. They have failed every time. They do not care.

1. We demand that you break the contract with Chartwells and get either a much higher quality catering service that SGA approves, or adopt a system like Boston University, where the University sources the food themselves (BU has one of the highest ranked college dining programs in the country) 

Or

2. If Trinity does not break the contract, they must allow students to get off of the meal plan if they wish. Again, forcing students to eat the food at Mather is inhumane. For full-pay students/students whose financial aid or scholarship covers no part of the meal plan, they would get a refund. For financial aid and scholarship students, they would receive a stipend for food that is equal to the amount they received to cover their meal plan.

3. If they do not want to break the contract with Chartwells, or let students off of the meal plan, then they must give every student a stipend for food. For the last time, students cannot be forced into getting foodbourne illnesses.

If Trinity is unwilling to consider either option, this confirms what we said above. Trinity does not care about their students' lives, only their pockets.