Having a University meal plan gives students the freedom to choose dining options, but the temptation of junk food is still present. Undergraduate students living on campus have limited dining options and even fewer ways to eat healthy foods that are convenient.
Freshman forensic science major Emily Ambrus believes dining services should make more of an effort to promote healthy foods.
“I know they try to incorporate vegetables into everything, but I just feel like they’re not doing enough. The fruit at the Falcon’s Nest is out of the way to the side. I feel like it should be more in the center, so people can see what there is,” she said.
Full-time students like Ambrus are predisposed to having irregular eating habits. This is largely due to the varied scheduling that comes with the college lifestyle.
“I usually go to the Oaks because of its location. Sometimes I’ll go to the Nest. I’ve been eating a lot of carbs, mostly pasta. I have a pretty set lunch schedule, but other than that I just eat whenever I feel hungry. Being in college definitely has made my eating habits more fluid,” she said.
One factor affecting meal schedules of students is a lot of them prefer to dine in groups with their friends. Sophomore neuroscience major Emma Stewart does this at the Union on a daily basis. Likewise, she and her friends routinely go to the Oaks for dinner. Stewart thinks that dining services does a good job at providing healthy options, especially with food that’s normally unhealthy.
“ChickenDipity offers grilled chicken, which is what I usually get for lunch. I don’t have the money or the time to make food in Kohl, but hopefully when I move off campus I’ll be able to make stuff at home,” she said.
Evan Ham, a freshman accounting major who resides in Kohl Hall, is another student representing undergrads who opt to eat at dining halls and the Union rather than make food in their dorms.
“The most I’ll ever do is maybe microwave some mac and cheese or something like that. I don’t cook or anything like that in Kohl. I usually make cereal in the room for breakfast, and I’ll just kind of eat whenever I can fit it in … I mostly go to the Carillon, because it’s a few steps away from Kohl,” he said. “I usually go for pizza because it’s reliable.”
The dreaded “freshman fifteen” is an expression referring to the weight that students often gain from eating too much unhealthy food during their first years. This phenomenon is thought to be propagated by things like buffet-style dining halls serving unending amounts of foods like pizza and pasta.
Emma Stewart believes that promotion of healthy eating is absolutely the responsibility of the University.
“The ‘freshman fifteen’ is probably real, and now that we’re all on our own, we don’t have our parents telling us to eat healthy all the time,” she said. “To encourage and establish healthy habits now will benefit us later in life, and really, what is a school about if it’s not bettering the future?”
