College Dining: An Eat-More Environment?
August 24, 2007
I had lunch today at one of Cornell’s brand-new undergraduate houses where 350 sophomores, juniors, and seniors have a meal plan that allows unlimited access to meals prepared in cafeteria as well as to snacks supplied at an all-night canteen. Unlimited access means that students do not pay for each item. Instead, they can eat as much as they want of three meals a day plus a late lunch four days a week, plus leftovers and snacks at night. For lunch (modest because it’s only the second day of classes), we had a choice of hamburgers, chicken burgers, fish burgers, or fish for sandwiches with lots of fixings; a salad bar; French fries (heavily salted); two soups; a fruit bar; and a bunch of baked desserts. In case that didn’t do, students could also do the bagel bar or make their own peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Cornell students have one healthy advantage; the campus is huge, these dorms are on the downhill side, and they have to hike uphill to get to class. And, of course, they are young. But I wonder how they figure out how to manage portions and calories in this kind of environment? Anyone have any idea?
I overheard someone in the hallway’s here at my college saying “people gain weight their freshman year because they treat the dining halls like a buffet instead of a grocery store.” It’s true! Students figure that they might as well get their fill since technically it is all you can eat.
It’s better to think “what would I eat if I were shopping for myself?” Some students don’t have a good answer to that question, but most know better than to fill their carts with cake and ice cream.
Those sweets are at every single meal in college, which is an unprecedented situation, even for Americans. It’s sad that college food has to be bad. There is an expectation that good food is for the older set and students can and should subsist of ramen and pizza. It’s the time when students are making the transition to independence, which means preparing and selecting their own meals. College sets up an environment of bad choices that leads to some awfully bad habits that can persist for life.
Comment by Melissa — August 25, 2007 @ 9:14 am
“What would I eat if I was shopping for myself” wouldn’t have helped, because I had never shopped for myself before when I lived in the dorms.
Both my wife and I had basically that cafeteria set up 10-15 years ago. We don’t remember a lot of cake and ice cream, but I remember all the Raisin Bran I could eat, and my wife has similar memories on Golden Grahams. The ice cream and cake probably didn’t have brand names attached to them. I used the salad bar a lot, not because of health motivations, but because it was familiar, I’d been to salad bars at restraunts before and knew how it worked, but I remember having nothing but distrust for the cafeteria part where the food visibly was prepared in large batches. I associated that with crappy food in schools and hospitals, and it took a while to realize that the cafeteria food wasn’t as bad tasting as normal cafeteria food. I made my own sandwiches a lot too. My wife remembers social stigma being a powerful limit on eating. Whatever you picked out your friends would all see and judge. If you wanted to pig out you’d do it in private not in the dorm cafeteria. Indeed, many people ate more healthily in the cafe, because they were being watched.
Everyone was homesick but wouldn’t admit it, I think that familiarity and social stigma were the main engines driving food choice in general and thus things like portion size or calorie consumption.
Comment by Brian M. — August 25, 2007 @ 4:12 pm
I did my undergraduate studies at Rutgers in NJ and which had several similar “buffet” style dining facilities. It took 4 years and 25 lbs to catch on to the fact that I could not eat whatever and as much as I wanted. Luckily I realized my error and got my diet and exercise back on track. To merit Rutgers they did provide healthy options and a newsletter that was left on the tables that discussed various nutritional topics which I used when I began to eat better and exercise. It has been about a year since I graduated and I have lost my college weight and then some. It was a hard lesson to learn though.
Comment by Phil T. — September 7, 2007 @ 12:39 pm
it is almost impossible to find a balance. my college has an unlimited dining service and either people are anorexic or big jocks loading up on all of the food. i struggle every day with the overwhelming variety, choices and quantity of food available.
Comment by liz — September 27, 2007 @ 5:01 pm
Coincidentally, I went to Cornell, though I lived in North Campus in an older dorm. The answer to your question is that some of us didn’t: each school year I re-gained the weight I lost each summer.
But it’s not as simple as you make it sound. For one thing, you only had access to three meals a day if you paid for that 20 meal/week plan. You could, when I attended, get 14, 10, 7, or 5 (IIRC) meal/week plans, but the cost per meal went up the fewer you bought… and not marginally.
Furthermore, the more meals you bought, the more Big Red Bucks you bought… a kind of debit system which could only be used for food bought on campus. (Not books, not cough drops, just food.) So if you bought 20 meals/week, you also bought, because you had no choice, hundreds of dollars worth of whatever they’d had at the mini convenience stores, vending machines, and a la carte dining facilities around campus.
Needless to say, with 20 buffet dining hall meals a week, few people could really use up that debit (which disappeared if you didn’t use it); even with 14 meals/week, I had to work to do so. It was not at all uncommon for students to have “points parties” in their classes the last week of class, not because they were especially generous, just to use their Big Red Bucks/points up.
You say that the students also had leftovers and snacks late. Maybe the system has changed, but officially you were only allowed to bring a piece of fruit or a dessert (ice cream or cookie) out of the dining hall with you. The dining hall I most often used closed for dinner at 7pm. So the impulse was both to stuff your face, knowing you’d be up studying until after midnight… or to smuggle out food, because even with a buffet, you’d paid a huge amount for your meal plan.
Which was another motivator: feeling you were getting your money’s worth. Sure, you could go to the dining hall and have bowl of cereal for lunch, but then you knew you were essentially being ripped off, simply by dividing the cost of your plan by the number of meals you got.
College meal plans are good in that they provide lots of food, and a lot of it’s even healthy. At Cornell, a lot of it was delicious, and it improved more even while I was there. (Although it should be stated that what was most consistently good was dessert.) But on some level they make the most sense for members of the football or field hockey teams, who are really eating enough (and should eat enough) to get their money’s worth.
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