<p>My son has life threatening allergies to milk, egg, nuts. He will not be able to eat in a dining hall but would like the experience of living on campus. He’ll need to find a single apartment with a kitchen. Does anyone know of any colleges that handle food allergies particularly well or have living options taht might work for my son?</p>
<p>I have no idea what your son’s academic qualifications are, but MIT has an on-campus grocery store (as opposed to just dining halls) and around half the dorms have kitchens, and no required meal plan.</p>
<p>One question I think you need to ask yourself is whether your son could safely live in a situation where he would prepare his own food, using his own pots, dishes, silverware, etc., but would share kitchen facilities with others.</p>
<p>I think it might be very difficult at most colleges to set up a situation where he would be the only one using a kitchen. If he needs his own kitchen to avoid any risk of cross-contamination, he may find it necessary to live off campus.</p>
<p>But if he can manage with a shared kitchen, it should be possible to make arrangements for on-campus living on most campuses. There are usually kitchen facilities available (with some dorms being better for this than others), and it would certainly be reasonable to ask the college to waive any supposedly required meal plan in his special situation.</p>
<p>Another thing you would need to think about is the availability of a grocery store. Even if there are kitchens in the dorms, don’t assume that there would necessarily be a supermarket within walking distance; there may not be. Many campuses have convenience stores, but they may not carry a sufficient variety of foods to enable a food-allergic student to plan a nutritious diet. Your son might need to have a car in order to be able to be able to buy food, and if freshmen are not allowed to have cars, he might have to ask for an exception to this rule, too.</p>
<p>The University of Chicago has dorm rooms with full or half kitchens in the room. These rooms are open to all years, and I am sure a request for one for allergy reasons would be honored. The nice thing is that he would still be living with first years as opposed to being in an upperclassmen dorm. I am sure there are other schools as well, but I know my own college best. </p>
<p>Marian brought up good points. I won’t repeat them, but re-read her post.</p>
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<p><a href=“https://www.foodallergy.org/shoppingcart/cgi-bin/msascartlist.dll/ProductInfo?productcd=PCOL[/url]”>https://www.foodallergy.org/shoppingcart/cgi-bin/msascartlist.dll/ProductInfo?productcd=PCOL</a></p>
<p>I haven’t seen this yet, but it looks as if it may be helpful.</p>
<p>I would think that colleges would be sitting up and taking notice of the numerous kids with severe food allergies in this generation. I work at a summer camp that has developed more and more stringent policies for keeping our allergic kids safe. Call the health offices of the schools you have interest in, and ask them about their policies and precautions. If they’re clueless, you don’t want to be involved with that school, and if they have a well developed policy with other such allergic kids, well, that might give you options. When I work with those such kids, as well as parenting an allergic kid, educating the food prep people in great detail is the essential piece of taking care of them. Regardless, you might need to involve a health office, as many apartment choices on campuses are reserved for upperclassmen. You might need special dispensation for your son to live in such an environment. My personal experience of this nature is with Univ. of Pittsburgh, nice apartments, but for upperclassmen only. The U of Chicago option above sounds great.</p>
<p>^^^ Really great advice.</p>
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<p>Educating the food prep people only goes so far. How the food is served also matters.</p>
<p>One of my kids attends a university with a pay-as-you-go dining hall system. Depending on how much food you choose, you get different amounts deducted from your dining account each time you eat in the dining hall. Most of the food is pre-portioned or served by someone behind the counter. With good education of the food prep people, such a setup might be safe for a food-allergic kid (although at this particular college I doubt it since one of the perennial complaints of the students is that none of the cafeteria personnel speak English, and therefore if you ask them for one kind of food, they often give you something else because they can’t understand what you are saying).</p>
<p>My other child attends a university with an all-you-care-to-eat dining hall system. She gets a set number of meals per week, and there is no difference in the cost regardless of whether she eats a lot of food or only a little at a particular meal. In her college’s dining halls, most of the food is set out in large containers, from which the students serve themselves (like a salad bar, basically, except that the same system is used for hot foods as well). The potential for cross-contamination of one dish from another is enormous, just as with a salad bar. Foods can fall into each other (you’ve seen pieces of hard-boiled egg in the pickled beets at a salad bar, right?), serving utensils can end up in the wrong containers, and when people put more than one kind of food onto a plate, there’s no guarantee that the serving utensils from one food won’t touch another type of food. There is no way that a student with a life-threatening food allergy could eat in those dining halls, no matter how sophisticated the food prep people are. If the college does have a method for serving meals to food-allergic students, it cannot possibly involve normal use of those dining halls.</p>
<p>kmcl: My son has identical conditions as your son. He is a Junior lives on campus and eats in the dinning hall.</p>
<p>When we were looking at colleges we were concerned about the very same thing. What we found is that now many kids have similar conditions and college dinning halls are very receptive to accomodating the needs. On most college campus (including state schools)we found that cafeterias have started color coding food. I even called and visited few college dieticians. They make sure that there are things that an allergic person can eat a meal. Most cafeterias we visited also had soy milk. Of course he always keeps liquid benadrill and ep-pen with him. We also asked for sub-free housing. Sub-free housing does not mean the kids don’t drink or smoke, it just assures that they won’t eat and drink in the room and dorm.</p>
<p>He also has to be very careful. He has developed the habbit of ‘tasting’ new food. If he gets scratchy sensation in the throat, he does not eat them.</p>
<p>We also got him a small refrigerator and once in a while he gets his ‘groceries’. In his first semester, he even told his roommate that he will not ‘share’ his fridge with him (to avoid food cross contamination).</p>
<p>Good Luck and don’t worry too much. He will be all right.</p>
<p>My daughter has a life threatening allergy to peanuts as well as a slight allergy to soy, but she does eat in the dining halls at school. We spoke to those in charge of food services before freshman year and then my daughter met with them when she arrived on campus. They do not serve any dishes with peanuts in them, but they of course have a jar of peanut butter out at all times. The problem was with the location of the peanut butter-next to the cream cheese, bagels and bread. My daughter got them to move the peanut butter and they have individual cream cheese packs that she can get from the back. The only thing she said is a problem is finding someone to go get this for her when the dining hall is busy, especially on the weekends during brunch.</p>
<p>Despite posting above, I am glad for this thread, as I hadn’t even thought about my peanut allergic D for next year. She currently on exchange in S America, and all my energies have gone towards concern for her current situation. As she has at this point survived 2 overseas HS exchanges, college in this country, in English, seemed far down the worry scale. But she’ll be living in a dorm, eating food service meals, at the college she deferred for a year. Perhaps I’ll give them a call. </p>
<p>Marian, you raise an interesting point regarding methods of serving. Might be interesting to see how many schools are not serving peanuts in food service at all these days, aside from that ever present scary jar of P butter. Learning to identify an allergy in Spanish, or whatever the relevant language, might be of help in dealing with food service as well.</p>
<p>My dining hall is the one that’s supposed to be peanut-allergy safe. Students with peanut allergies get meal plans for my dining hall (meal plans are specific to a certain dining hall, pretty much). We have peanut butter, but instead of a big communal jar there are sealed single-serving packets. I completely forgot that our school had a peanut safe dining hall. I’m assuming other schools may have similar set-ups.</p>
<p>great lakes mom- I tried to send you a PM, but your box is full.</p>
<p>we had a few places on campus aside from the dining room where it was like a little resteraunt - pizza, burgers, fries, etc. There was a huge sign up at the one place that said we use peanut oil in our… and it listed what. I would think if they don’t have a sign hanging up they would tell you.</p>