Campus administration, as well as the national legislature, say they want students to be healthy. They say they intend to follow guidelines and get the right amount of veggies and fruit in a young person”s average diet rather than offering them only fatty, artery-clogging foods.
To that end, where the heck is my salad bar?
The Idaho Commons used to have a full salad bar that students could go to for one of the only healthy choices available in the food court.
The commons food court is perhaps not as large as Bob”s Place, but it provided off-campus students with a place to go for a relatively fresh salad. And now that space is used for lines of students waiting to order from the new Chick-fil-A.
Don”t get me wrong, the food at Chick-fil-A tastes pretty good, and it is real chicken, not the weird processed patties and nuggets found at McDonald”s, but they don”t exactly offer many meals that are good for you. What they do offer is crispy, fried chicken, that despite the political controversy, people still love to shove into their mouths – me included.
Sure, I can pull a pre-prepared salad from one of the coolers, but I probably won”t enjoy it. Either the lettuce will be mushy or the ham will be too salty or I won”t get to combine the chicken and cranberries with honey mustard and almonds. It isn”t the same.
Claire Whitley
I can also go over to the Sub Connection and order a sandwich piled high with vegetables, but even that won”t replace the salad bar.
The only place students can go to get a relatively fresh salad is Bob”s Place. For those of us upperclassmen who don”t have meal plans and actually have to pay to get into Bob”s by the meal upfront, $10 is a lot for one salad. I”ll take my Tupperware in there and get as much food as I can for the jacked up price, but that”s apparently frowned upon now, or always was and I just didn”t care my freshman year.
There really isn”t anywhere on camps that has affordable, fresh vegetables or other healthy food for off-campus students. That is the one and only reason I miss Bob”s. They have a great salad bar.
The only places on campus I ever spend my money are at Stover”s Café, Einstein”s and Chick-fil-A, but none of these places have fresh salads. They do have the boxed ones, but they make me a little uncomfortable.
For a first lady like Michelle Obama to tell us that we should be eating healthy, I am always wondering how to go about doing that. How are we supposed to eat healthy on campus? How are we supposed to afford to eat healthy at home when fresh produce costs an arm and a leg?
It shouldn”t be hard for students to eat healthy on campus should they choose to. Sure, it is normally cheaper to buy frozen food at Win-Co, or purchase the relatively cheap Chick-fil-A meals, but gosh. Every once in a while, a girl just needs a salad.
Claire Whitley can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @Cewhitley24