What a reunion it was in the past semester: finally no more meowing professor kittens in the zoom background, instead the canteen again.

How I missed it, the noise, the hustle and bustle and that smell of a mixture of beef patty and stir-fried vegetables.

Alas, there is no more beautiful place on campus.

Firstly, because you don't have to do anything in the canteen, you can waste time there instead.

Two assignments have to be handed in?

It doesn't matter, first go to the canteen with fellow students and chat for an hour or two and sip coffee.

Second, there is a full plate for around three euros.

Not always tasty, not always refined, but always a lot.

My all-time favorite of the vegetarian canteen dishes are the “Potato Pockets with French Fries”.

Here you can tell that the kitchen has thought about the needs of its young guests and shows what it has in its fryer from an ecological and culinary point of view.

sweetheart!

Usually there is no one who can still follow a lecture after such a meal in the delirium of the eating coma.

But nobody should.

A plate of fried potato variations is an expression of charity, because students usually don't feel like going to lectures.

Sleep instead of study thanks to the canteen.

Great!

Where did the horror rice go?

Of course, that's not the purpose of university catering and that must have dawned on the chefs when they took the potato-fat bomb from the canteen menus of the republic, as friends from all over Germany told me.

That must have been the case in my canteen at the University of Mannheim in 2018 and the potato and cream cheese pockets were served there with creamed vegetables immediately.

It's not particularly smart, but it's much healthier and you can study afterwards without two or three snaps to digest.

Today they are completely gone.

A change in the German canteen is clear from the potato pockets: Vegetarian and vegan became sexy and the kitchens are now making an effort with the veggie dishes.

I really became aware of this during my first visit to the canteen since Corona in autumn.

While the canteen staff stared boredly at the mashed potatoes with sausage, the students were queuing for the vegetarian menu.

Before Corona it was the other way around, I imagine.

And then there was this: The vegetables in the rice pan were cooked al dente, and there were fresh herbs and a wedge of lime.

I was looking forward to the overcooked vegetables and tomato rice, which always required so much water to rinse off.

Awesome!

In addition to the potato pockets, the horror rice is now gone.

How did that happen?

I call the Studierendenwerk Mannheim, whose spokeswoman Astrid Brandenburger proudly tells me about the spirit of optimism in university gastronomy.

The needs of the students are changing, and the Studierendenwerk is reacting to this.

At the same time, it is important to them to make their contribution to a more sustainable world.

The sales figures show that fewer and fewer students want bratwurst and ragout.

Since I started my studies at the University of Mannheim in winter 2015, sales of the vegetarian-vegan menu have increased by 45 percent.

The paper cup fiasco

The number is all the more impressive when you consider the restricted pandemic operations.

Although the university canteen has currently sold 70,000 fewer meals than in the same period in 2015, 13,000 more vegan/vegetarian dishes were cooked.

Compared to winter 2019 alone, the last regular semester before Corona, sales increased by 5,500 dishes (15 percent).

The trend towards plant-based foods seems to have accelerated in recent years.

Currently, only 55 percent of all food sold in the Mannheim university canteen contains meat or fish.

In order to find out more about the needs of the young target group, the Studierendenwerk carried out an online survey together with the Asta and "Scientists for Future" at the beginning of 2021.

Of the 1,000 participants, 10 percent said they were vegan, and 35 percent were mostly vegetarian.

But a whopping 90 percent would like a larger range of plants.

For comparison: According to a survey by the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture, one in ten people in Germany is vegetarian, and 2 percent are vegan.

The implications for the Studierendenwerk are clear.

As a first step, it converted its campaign counter in the university canteen into a green counter advertising "mindful campus food".

Instead of cream cake or dead animal, there are now beetroot burgers, green smoothies and climate-neutral coffee with CO2 compensation.

For the desire of many students for more sustainability, the Studierendenwerk also accepts financial risks.

That becomes clear elsewhere.

In 2020, it banned disposable coffee cups from the university campus, of which students still used 394,000 in 2018.

You can hardly imagine this amount of waste, how much you earn with a filter coffee price of one euro, but good.

If you act more sustainably than the students would like, hundreds of thousands of euros are quickly wasted because they go to the café next door, which still distributes paper cups.

That has to be emphasized: Mannheim is not Berlin, at Germany's renowned business administration university there are more sailing shoes than home-made ones, a great internship counts more here than a self-grown avocado tree with Mozart music for reforesting the shared room.

So if 45 percent of all students here no longer want a chop, then falafel, tofu and green spelled have arrived in the bourgeois middle of the younger generation.

The bourgeois of tomorrow will eat green.

If everyone toasts each other with their ceramic coffee cups, then there is real hope.

For the planet, for fewer fries and for all the rest.