 Cal Dining has created this false image that the suppliers that they buy from are humane towards animals, that they are environmentally sustainable and that they treat workers with respect, but that could not be further from the truth. Dining halls are staple to the Berkeley undergraduate experience. However, recent protests suggest that there may be more than these boxes than meets the eye. I'm Ritika Kupam for Cal TV News and let's talk food. On April 12th, 2021, members from the Berkeley Organization for Animal Advocacy stood up in protest against UC Berkeley's dining hall practices. For 12 hours, three students from the organization even bike-locked their necks to the reeling inside Crossroads Dining Hall. It's honestly just really horrifying and laughable to me that they're claiming they're vetting these suppliers when all of these suppliers are committing such atrocious acts. Tyson, Hormel, Coleman, and Harris Ranch are the four major factory farms and UC Berkeley food suppliers that Susanna, Erica, and Zoe are pushing the university to abandon. Our intentions were just to disrupt business as usual so that they would stop ignoring our requests and finally reconcile the fact that most of their suppliers have already been found for animal abuse, worker abuse, human trafficking violations, and environmental degradation. This student-led fight against factory farming dates all the way back to fall 2017. After not being heard for years, they turned to more drastic measures. We said that we weren't going to leave until either the chancellor agreed to meet with us or until they dropped these horrible factory farms they were supplying from. While university dining services declined to speak on this issue, they provided a statement saying, we will only work with suppliers whose animal welfare methods are in alignment with the best practices and will discontinue our relationship with any supplier if they fail to live up to these standards. While their promised interview with Chancellor Christ is yet to be scheduled, Zoe, Savannah, and Erica are glad that this movement is finally gaining traction. Animal cruelty is something that is, you know, really normalized in our society and in a lot of ways we don't even realize it. And students in the public have a right to know exactly what is happening and that is why we are fighting so hard to bring it to light. If any university is going to stand up against factory farming, I think that Berkeley should be the first institution to do so. This has been Ritika Kupam for CalTV News.