My first reliable memory is of cake. Six days before my second birthday, I was presented by my aunt with a brown cat cake, iced in chocolate. I remember some of my gifts, the vague outlines of her apartment, but the cake stands out.

Pretty much all the quality holidays for me were the ones that came with festive dishes. Christmas was when my mother became a semi-professional confectioner overnight, making enormous quantities of fudge and peanut butter balls. Thanksgiving meant my paternal grandma’s pies — pecan, pumpkin, apple, cherry, huckleberry, black walnut — and my maternal grandma’s astronaut pseudo-food, her boxed mashed potatoes, tinned green bean casserole, dried Stove Top stuffing. Even everyday food stays with me: my great-grandma’s graham crackers sandwiched with homemade icing, invariably stored in an old red aluminum tin with a sliding lid; my aunt’s biscuits and gravy, heavy on the sausage; my dad’s weird liquidy first-attempt hummus, his sturdy loaves of brown bread, and the way he’d lecture me on the fundamentals of Cajun cooking, the mirepoix of celery, onions and pepper. In a big way, most of the culture consciously transmitted to me was food.

This is true of a great many cultures, I think. The way smell and taste evokes memories is universal. Even though people might leave their home country, or childhood religion, or lose fluency in their earliest language, there is still an unbroken thread running back if they are able to eat the way their family knows how. Cooking is universal; it is what makes us human. An interviewee in direct provision said their children had never seen them cook a meal.

Of the 33 direct provision centres in Ireland, the multinational juggernaut Aramark runs three on a for-profit basis. Like so many other things, direct provision was launched in 1999 and intended as a short-term solution, which over the intervening two decades has ossified into the “open prison” system that refugees are struggling with today. Running the centres is big business, and Aramark’s catering contracts with prisons in the U.S. made them a natural fit for direct provision. While it is difficult to find exact numbers for how much Aramark has banked over the years, in 2016 alone the multinational received €5.2 million for housing approximately 850 refugees. As of June 2018, of the more than 5,500 asylum seekers in Ireland, almost a third are children under the age of 18. If this were truly a brief stop on the way to a fully-integrated life in Ireland, perhaps it would be defensible, but the statistics are staggering. People spend, on average, three years in these facilities, but hundreds have been held for more than seven years. Children have been born on Irish soil and raised in direct provision.

While the right to work for asylum seekers has been recently and conditionally recognised, the more fundamental right to cook has not. Refugees in Aramark’s centres line up at three set times a day to be fed canteen-style, with no exceptions. “Frankly I feel like I am eating in Guantanamo… security people are standing there with walkie radios talking to each other. […] The security standing there makes me nervous. They (security) turn off the light (in the dining room) at seven o’clock even if people are still eating, as dinner is 5pm to 7pm,” reports a refugee in Cork in Keelin Barry’s report What’s Food Got to Do With It? The Irish Refugee Council has documented cases of malnutrition amongst children and pregnant women. Refugees have repeatedly gone on hunger strikes at the low quality of food, and what food is available is criticized as bland, repetitive, medically unfit, culturally and religiously inappropriate, unsafely cooked, high in fat and sugar and low in nutrients. “I cannot be having just potatoes everyday with bread and butter – that’s what I am having…” reports another Cork refugee, in the absence of halal options. Those who attempt to circumvent the diktats and cook in secret have their cookers and food confiscated during the staff’s unannounced spot-checks of refugees’ rooms. Barry reports that one refugee she interviewed, “spoke about going out walking on the Cork roads near the Direct Provision centre in the evening to take his mind off his hunger.” These aren’t criticisms of Aramark unique to its operations in Ireland, or unusual in their severity: Aramark’s American prison catering has matched its direct provision cuisine, underfeeding prisoners and causing diarrhea and vomiting with mouldy and maggot-infested food.

Aramark has operated the ‘Westland Eats’ restaurants (Costa, Freshii, Gastro) in the Hamilton Building since 2016, which has become a focus of the Aramark Off Our Campus activist group. Since 2014, TCDSU has a long-term mandate to campaign against direct provision; and since earlier this year, a requirement to lobby against renewing Aramark’s contract with Trinity, which runs out in 2021. Additionally, Aramark bought the Avoca retail chain in 2015 and in 2016 entered into a ‘five-year strategic partnership’ with Chopped, the popular salad outlets dotted around the city. While direct action and pressuring authorities to cancel contracts is a vocal and visible way to protest Aramark profiting off human misery, boycotting Aramark-operated outlets is accessible to everyone.

In lieu of a coffee from the Aramark-run Costa located within the Hamilton building, take a two-minute walk in nearly any direction: The Science Gallery offers locally-roasted coffee; Offbeat Donuts does a great deal on coffee and a donut, both in their Pearse Station location and in the SU shops; Insomnia and The Pav are just around the corner. For more substantial fare, nearby Zambrero offers burritos, tacos and bowls with a social conscience, and explicitly cater to vegan and coeliac diners; Chopped competitor KC Peaches hosts an impressive salad bar and a student discount; at Pig & Heifer, you can get a sandwich big enough to last you all day; and the SU Cafe in Goldsmith Hall is always a reliable stop. Or celebrate your freedom to cook for yourself and bring something from home. You’ve got the opportunity to choose where and what to eat; make the right choice.