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Sustainable Dining

Global food systems account for about a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions. Dining at NYU Abu Dhabi fosters and promotes sustainability through its business practices, menu offerings, and dining operations.

Cool Food Pledge

New York University is a signatory to the Cool Food Pledge, a commitment to reduce food-related greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2030.

This pledge encompasses all contracted dining facilities at NYU’s campuses in New York, Shanghai, and Abu Dhabi, collectively accounting for over 20 NYU-run dining facilities around the world. Additionally, NYU joins over 30 other global organizations serving over 800 million meals annually.

To accomplish this, NYUAD will incorporate the EAT-Lancet and Menus of Change frameworks into its dining principles, emphasizing a variety of sustainability objectives such as:

  • Featuring daily menus that have vegetarian and vegan options that are healthy, protein-rich, and wellness-oriented.
  • Offering vegan options wherever dairy products are offered.
  • Serving Beyond or other vegan burgers at every grill location including plant based meat substitutes such as Beyond Meat and Sweet Earth products in multiple recipes and served at multiple outlets across campus.
  • Bringing educational programs to teach students how to make delicious, healthy, planet-friendly choices, and how to cook these things for themselves.

Responsible Dining

Meatless Mondays at Campus West Dining Hall

In an effort to support our community members' health and NYUAD's environmental goal of the Cool Food pledge (committed to reduce our food-related greenhouse gas emissions by 25% by 2030), we are implementing a weekly Meatless Monday menu at Campus West Dining Hall. Our menu is designed with delicious plant-based recipes and guides so you can implement Meatless Monday easily and deliciously.

So let’s imagine a year of our community committing to this small lifestyle change just one day a week. If we commit, by this time next year, we would have offset enough water to fill our Olympic-size swimming pool 52 times. We’ve saved a rainforest that is almost the size of the entirety of Sadiyaat Island. And we’ve offset a roundtrip drive from Paris to campus and back.

It’s a small change, but you can see how much of an impact it makes if we all come together!

SMALL PRINT: All data sourced from RCS, OECD, and USEPA. Grill counter still offers animal proteins during Meatless Mondays at Campus West Dining Hall.