It’s Restaurant Week in Binghamton, which means that many students will be eating at their top spots in Downtown Binghamton to grab delicious food and support local businesses. Now let’s just pretend for a second that your favorite spot downtown made over 3 percent of its annual income off of prisons they operated. Additionally, pretend this food place had a history of racism and practiced performative activism. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to eat at that restaurant. Yet every time students swipe their meal cards at the Binghamton University dining halls, we are inadvertently choosing to support Sodexo, a company that does exactly as described above.

For those who don’t know, Binghamton University Dining Services (BUDS) is managed by the contracted food management company, Sodexo. This is an alternative to internally managing food services with university employees and focusing on locally sourced foods, as at other schools such as the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. This means that a large portion of BU students’ meal plans go to paying Sodexo, which, as I alluded to above, is much less innocent than many students may realize. Universities across the country often choose food management companies to provide dining for their students as a way to help control costs. The three most common food management companies are Sodexo, Aramark and Compass. While all three of these companies have less-than-flattering histories, Sodexo has received the most criticism, and for good reason.

Firstly, Sodexo supports the for-profit prison system. On their website, they clearly state, “Sodexo does not profit from prison labor.” However, they fully manage five prisons in the United Kingdom and additionally service 84 other prisons worldwide. They say they don’t “profit,” but some estimate that they receive over 3 percent of their annual income from the prison system; unfortunately, estimates are all I could find online given that Sodexo chooses not to publish their prison profit numbers. Additionally, in 2001, Sodexo owned the largest stake, an 8 percent investment, in the Corrections Corporation of America — this company currently owns about half of U.S. private prisons.

In addition to their investment in the prison system which, I might add, systematically incarcerates people of color at higher rates than their white counterparts, Sodexo has a history of systematic racism. Sodexo had to pay $80 million in lawsuit settlements following the denial of managerial promotions to Black workers in 2005. What is even more disgusting was when a Sodexo director hit an African-Caribbean manager in the face in 2014 and later said it was “punch-a-Black-week.” Yet, despite their long history of racism, some of which hasn’t even been included here, Sodexo still claims support for the Black Lives Matter movement and released supportive statements during Black History Month.

Now that I have finished my tirade about Sodexo, I want to shift the conversation back to Binghamton. You may be asking yourself, what can we do? What is the alternative? The answer is to drop Sodexo, now. Many universities across the nation have already ended their contracts with Sodexo due to student protests. The “Drop Sodexo’’ movement originated at Scripps College, where students demanded that Sodexo be thrown out due to their actions described above. In addition to Sodexo being dumped at Scripps, Sodexo has also been dropped at Ithaca College.

I will admit that we are currently in a 10-year contract with Sodexo that will not expire until 2025. However, contracts such as ours have not prevented other schools from preemptively ending their arrangements. For example, in 2017, Stony Brook ended its five-year contract with Sodexo early following similar student complaints about raw meat and bun-less burgers.

As we demand an end to our agreement with Sodexo, we must consider our next steps. It will be crucial that the University does not end our agreement with one unethical company just to write a new contract with another. New York University recently replaced Aramark with Chartwells, a subsidiary of the Compass Group food management company. Instead, we must argue for independent food management through the University as was done at Ithaca College after dropping Sodexo. Let’s employ local Binghamton managers and purchase food from local growers as opposed to having a megalithic food management company determine our lunch menu.

Sodexo’s history of human rights violations are indeed social justice, and this food management monopoly deserves to be held accountable for their insidious past. What we can do is argue to have Sodexo replaced right now. We cannot continue to dump our money into a company that has values so different from our campus community. We have to drop Sodexo now.

Jonathan Gaughan is a senior majoring in integrative neuroscience.