As a junior in college, I am spending my first year living off-campus in my own apartment. As a result, I opted out of getting a meal plan because I knew I would just cook all my food at my apartment. I have not stepped foot in a dining hall all year and have realized how much of an impact that has made.
As a freshman, the first time you walk into a dining hall you are completely amazed at all the options that you have before you. You quickly think to yourself you will never get sick of this food with all these options. That’s your first mistake. While the dining hall may seem like a five-star restaurant the first few weeks, you quickly get sick of it. After the third week of eating pizza or a salad you start to crave home-cooked meals and often wonder what the dining hall does to the pasta sauce to make it taste so bland. After a long stressful day of class and studying, many students make a beeline to the burgers, pizza, and fries station because that looks better than the limp lettuce and discolored tomatoes. You tell yourself, "Oh just for today I’ll eat bad, tomorrow I’ll eat healthy." But those days of “eating bad just this once” start to add up and you start to notice your waistband getting just a little tighter.
It’s hard to eat healthy though when your dining hall offers little variety of fruits and vegetables and a large variety of processed, sugary and fattening food. The small amount of fruits and vegetables they do offer are either sprayed with chemicals to make them look fresher than they actually are (since they are sitting out all day) or they cover them in some sort of sauce to make it taste better. One night, I was excited to see they had cooked carrots and I went over to put some on my plate only to realize that they were covered in brown sugar sauce. Dining halls also offer a large quantity of different sugary drinks that range from soda to sugary sweet tea to lemonade. These drinks often tempt students while the healthier options such as water or milk are left abandoned.
Many people blame the freshman 15 on late-night eating, alcohol and lack of exercise. While these are factors that contribute to gaining weight, what we also need to realize is a big factor is the dining hall. Like I said earlier, I have not eaten at the dining hall all year. I have been making my own meals and have noticed I feel a lot more energetic and healthier lately. Buying and cooking my own food has taught me how to eat healthier because I am more aware of what I am putting in my body. The temptation to grab some french fries on the side is gone and it’s showing. Usually around this time of year, I start to notice some weight gain and feel sluggish throughout the day. However, this year I feel as though I have been able to maintain a healthier lifestyle. While many factors can contribute to it—I am getting older and have learned set aside time to workout and I watch when and what I snack on—I firmly believe that removing myself from the unhealthy food that the dining hall gives to us as students is one of the biggest contributions.
After a few months students start to realize that they need to work out regularly and that late night snacking isn’t the best option. These are all things that we, as students, can control because they are decisions that we make, we choose to eat pizza at 12 a.m. and choose to skip working out to watch Netflix. But if we want, we could easily change our habits and many students do. However, we cannot control what the dining hall serves us. While we can try to eat healthy, one can only eat a salad so many days without getting sick of it. Putting butter and cheese on our vegetables only makes the search for healthy food harder and we have no choice but to eat what is given to us, even if that means eating unhealthy. When you live in a small dorm room, you don’t have the option to skip a bad day at the dining hall and go back to your room to cook something better because chances are the only thing you can cook in your dorm room is whatever you can heat up in the microwave, which probably is just as unhealthy as what the dining hall is offering.
I do not mean to bash the dining halls and I am grateful for the two years of dorm living where they provided me with food, so I didn’t live solely on Ramen and Easy Mac. However, I think that dining halls need to start watching what they feed their students. They should spend more money on healthy items and reduce the amount of fattening foods they offer. Some universities work with local farmers and buy their fruits and vegetables so they can provide fresher and healthier options, while also supporting the local economy. This is a great idea that almost every university should do if possible. There are many steps that can be taken to improve what we ingest and if universities start taking those steps, then maybe the term freshman 15 will slowly cease to exist.
