With the rise of anonymous Simmons accounts, Bartol Bites creates a wholesome and welcoming space to review food at Bartol Hall.

Bartol Bites is an Instagram account that posts before and after images of the food they eat at Barton Hall—the dining hall on Simmons residential campus. The captions typically contain a few sentences reviewing the food and sharing some personal anecdotes.

The account is run by a first-year residential student who started the account after a friend commented on how much they loved eating at Bartol. “It started as a joke,” they explain, “and then I got into it.”

In every review, there are before and after images of their meals. These are essential to the review: “so people can know if I did or didn’t like it by how much I eat or not.”

Last year during the fall semester, students alleged unsafe food at Bartol Hall. Due to the positivity about Bartol in Bartol Bites’s posts, students have asked if they are a PR stunt. “No,” they clarify, “I’m a fan—I’m a hardcore fan.”

Besides being a Bartol fan, they also want to emphasize the importance of eating. “I feel like most [people at a women’s centered institution] have felt stressed about food at one point in their life,” they say, “[I don’t want] people to be scared to eat or think it’s not good to eat.”