After more than a decade without universal hot breakfast across dining halls, students and staff are taking a stand. Armed with a petition of over 2,000 student signatures, and backed by unionized Harvard University Dining Hall workers and Harvard Student Labor Action Movement (SLAM), members of the Harvard community are ready to put up a fight: they want hot breakfast, now.
“Harvard is struggling to provide basic needs: hot morning meals to all students in all Houses. Why?” asked first-year Samaga Pokharel ’26. “What’s even the point of having a bloated endowment if they can’t even feed their students right? What’s even the point of the large endowment if they don’t care about their essential workers? Schools with much lower endowment are rapidly listening to campus voices and changing their policies as fast as possible, so what’s taking a school like Harvard long?”
Budget cuts across Harvard’s programs in 2009 ended hot breakfast offerings in dining halls. Over a decade later, they have yet to be reintroduced. As a result, long breakfast lines of students willing to make the trek fill Quincy House and Annenberg every morning, often overwhelming dining hall staff and placing increasing pressure on already limited hot breakfast items. Other students choose to skip breakfast altogether and do not sit down for a free meal until lunch or dinner.
“I signed this petition because I want the option to have a normal breakfast in the morning close by,” stated Cole Yellin ’25, a resident of Adams House. “I think it’s ridiculous at a school where unlimited dining plans are required to not even provide a decent breakfast. Right now, hot breakfast is far and students won’t go out of their way most mornings for food, so they end up not eating breakfast, which isn’t healthy.”
Picture this. You wake up after a long night of studying, ready to start your day. It’s 10am. Realizing you have some time to spare, you head down the steps of your House and enter your dining hall. The smell of pancakes, eggs, sausages, home fries, and the waffle machine is overwhelming. You fill your plate, grab yourself a cup of coffee, and enjoy a warm breakfast.
Yet for most students, this reality does not exist.
Having hot breakfast in every House might reduce strain on dining hall staff. “For the workers, it would likely help them not have to deal with an overflow of students in one House. Also, they wouldn’t have to monitor the items so closely because there would be more variety for people to choose from,” Yellin speculated.
Pokharel cited her parents, who work in the food industry, as a reason to sign the petition. “The workers at Quincy and Annenberg have lives, too. Whenever I see them being overworked in the mornings, I think of my parents,” she stated. “They are human, too. Workers at Annenberg or Quincy don’t need to be over-swamped with students from all Houses, especially not in early mornings.”
In addition to the student-led petition, a worker’s petition undersigned by HUDS Local 26 members is also collecting signatures urging Harvard to reimplement the full hot breakfast program. “This campaign is organized in solidarity with UNITE HERE Local 26, the union of Harvard dining hall workers. Our demands have the support and approval of Local 26 shop stewards,” reads an October 28th email sent to students that details the petition.
Harvard SLAM has also initiated protests for union groups on campus such as the Harvard Graduate Students Union-United Automobile Workers and for custodians and security guards, seeking improvement in contract renewals and employee benefits.
Organizers from SLAM explained that the hot breakfast petition functions to “let Harvard administration know that we want accessible hot breakfast across campus.” SLAM fights for both labor justice in Harvard and around Boston, and hopes that considering the current conditions, the outcome of the petition will be for Harvard to finally reimplement the full hot breakfast program.
Pokharel, as well as most students who signed the petition, hopes others will get on board and back the workers who are often unable to actively challenge their working conditions.
“Signing the petition was the least I could do, it’s the least we all can do,” she said. “We have the choice to choose whether to care or not. A lot of the workers don’t. They have to work.”
Layla Chaaraoui ’26 (laylachaaraoui@college.harvard.edu) hopes her future House will have hot breakfast in the mornings.