Navigating the 11 dining locations on campus can be difficult for any student, but a Ball State alumna, Stacey Grogg, has returned to campus to connect students to resources and provide information.
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Grogg joined the Ball State dining team in July as the wellness nutritionist.
“That’s always been a dream of mine, to get back on campus,” Grogg said. “Everyone’s wonderful, and it’s been great seeing students and just being back.”
Grogg meets with students who have celiac disease, a gluten intolerance, food allergies or want to find ways to eat healthy on campus. She emphasizes using NetNutrition, an online resource that allows students and faculty to see daily menus and nutrition facts for each dining location. The website also allows menu items to be filtered to show only items that are vegan or vegetarian, or foods don’t contain certain allergens, such as peanuts.
Grogg also works with campus chefs and dining location managers so that students with special dietary needs feel more comfortable approaching them.
“If there’s gonna be like a breaded chicken and they’re gluten intolerant or if they’re celiac, it’s like okay, we can get you in contact with the chef and they can get something aside for you and they can prepare it differently,” Grogg said. “The chefs are amazing. I was a student here for so long, but I didn’t realize all of the stuff that they did.”
Grogg never wants students to feel like a burden by reaching out to her, and the rest of the staff feels the same way.
“If you have any of these needs, please call us,” Suzanne Clem, marketing coordinator, said. “Don't sit around even more than a day needing help without asking for it, because that’s exactly why we have a wellness nutritionist.”
In addition to working with students, Grogg also takes calls and emails from parents who may have concerns or want information on what options are available for their children.
She said there could be a perception that it’s hard to eat healthy on campus, but learning how to navigate through each dining location can help.
“So many of our locations have at least one area that has custom-made things, so if you love pepperoni, great, you can have that on your sandwich, but if you’re vegan or vegetarian, you can choose things that wouldn’t have any of those,” Clem said. “At the [Noyer] deli, they have a lettuce wrap that you can have your sandwich made with instead of any kind of bread product, so that’s an interesting, unique way that we can incorporate all those diets.”
Students wanting to set up a meeting with Grogg can do so by calling 765-285-2116 or emailing her at slgrogg@bsu.edu.
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