It’s Sunday brunch and you find yourself stranded on campus at Penn State with no other option than to lower your dining standards to that of the Southside Buffet in the Redifer Dining Commons.
Located in South Halls, this buffet constantly surprises me with new failures in gluten-free dining. Diners enter at a register, swipe their meal card, and enter the buffet line with a tray. The kind workers scoop servings of each dish onto a plate for the consumer, depending on which meal items they request. This style of serving is inherently dangerous for gluten-free eaters. The potential for food spillage or shared spoons makes the risk for cross-contamination extremely high. Especially recently, the buffet has been “self serve,” where diners take the food themselves. The buffet workers have been trained to exquisitely portion and present meals, but people with celiac can have zero trust in their fellow diners to correctly avoid contaminating food with gluten.
Even if I would like to relax after a long day of identifying cross-contamination and reward myself with a treat, all baked goods available from the Penn State Bakery contain gluten and the self-service ice cream containers with shared scoops are unsafe for celiacs.
I will give credit that each dish is clearly labeled with allergens, so gluten-free eaters can identify which items they cannot eat. However, on pasta and pizza nights, this may include almost the entire buffet. For several weeks in a row, celiacs may have to resort to the recurring meal of grilled chicken and poaching off of the salad bar.
While there are obvious flaws, the Southside Buffet is generously stocked with sealed, gluten-free bagels,
cookies, muffins, and rolls, rotating between the options. There is a hidden fridge (the location of which I will not disclose, for my own selfishness) where these are available to diners. Sometimes it is necessary to specially request them from an employee, since they have taken measures to avoid having these items taken by non-celiac diners. This effort does bring comfort to the gluten-free eater in Redifer.
After considering the convenient gluten-free fridge, but high levels of cross-contamination, I award the Southside Buffet a 2 star GF rating.
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