Dorm Food

Lexington seems to be filling up with incoming freshmen. Many of these freshmen (as well as assorted upper classmen) will soon be infesting the dorms, and, of course, eating dorm food. Two months ago in Fort Collins I ate dorm food. The good people at ETS put us up in the Colorado State dorms, which have a passably decent cafeteria. It’s neither the best (Cornell) nor the worst (University of Oregon) that I’ve seen, but it does the job. Because the ETS crew is committed to making all of the participants gain at least five pounds during the grading week, I was extremely careful; I always skipped lunch, never had desert, drank only diet pop, and exercised obsessively. Following upon the dietary disasters that were Las Vegas and Seattle, maintaining this program was my only hope.

It occured to me while in Fort Collins, however, that dorm cafeterias are a blight upon our society. It is customary to speak of the “freshmen fifteen”, but in my case, it turned out to be a freshmen thirty-five. I entered my freshmen year at a svelte 175, left it at 210, and haven’t seen 200 since. While my circumstances were somewhat special (my grandmother was a bad cook even before she suffered a stroke, I never took the time to learn how to cook properly, and as such I was almost guaranteed to gain weight as soon as I began a normal eating regimen), it nevertheless seems that a lot of people gain a lot of weight as soon as they get to college.

When I got to UO, I didn’t know what to do with myself. Suddenly, all the pop, cake, and fried food in the world was available to me. My consumption at all three meals increased dramatically. In retrospect, I dearly wish that there had been some sort of dietary counseling or warning available. It had never occured to me to read the back of a can of Coke, and thus I hadn’t the faintest understanding of how many calories I was ingesting when I drank three glasses of pop a night. I would often grab a bagel with cream cheese after eating a full breakfast, having no idea just how bad that was for me. This is to say nothing, of course, of the immense amounts of pizza and Taco Bell that college freshmen become accustomed to eating.

Given that the late teens seem to be important in determining eventual body weight and, more generally, healthy eating habits, I’m kind of surprised that there wasn’t more attention paid to teaching young college students how to eat. While in Fort Collins, I didn’t notice any material in or near the dorm cafeteria that had nutritional information or nutritional warnings, so I’m assuming that the situation today at CSU is roughly similar to the situation I knew at UO. I’m curious, though; how many people faces similar situations when they went to college? Are there any universities that have more of an appreciation for good nutrition than the UO did?