Sam Blinderman
Professor Leake
WRIT 1133
4-24-12
Oreo
Cookies
When is the last
time you sat down and had dinner? I’m not talking about eating in college where
food is inhaled rather than eaten, I'm talking about having a set time for
dinner, sitting down with friends or family and eating. During this meal you
should talk with them, see how their day went, if anything is bothering them,
at least pretend to be interested for the duration of the meal. Dinner, and
furthermore meals in general are becoming shorter and shorter as time goes on.
We are turning into unhealthy eaters by shoving food in our face whenever we
have a second free. The lack of time that we have today is transforming how we
eat into something it never should’ve become. This change doesn’t take place
until college though. Bear with me for a second and imagine your life is an
Oreo cookie. Each part of the cookie represents a stage of life. It’s no
coincidence that two of the layers, the outside cookies, are the same because
in these stages your relationship with food is similar. The outside cookies
represent a relationship with food in which you organize your meals around
others. For example, when you're really young, you're mom screams up the stairs
that it’s time for dinner, and when you have a family of your own you scream up
the stairs to your kids that it’s time to come down for dinner. During this
time you are focused on eating with your family rather than when you can. This
brings us to the cream filling of the cookie or independence stage, which represents
the middle years of life where you are busy with college, work, and everything
else. In these years you don’t have time to sit down and eat dinner because your
schedule is based around yourself rather than a family. During this stage you
are not focused on sitting down and having dinner at the end of the day, but
rather how much work you can finish before the hunger overtakes your brain and
says, “go eat something quickly.” Eighteen year olds everywhere are realizing
there are no more family dinners at college, and they’re shifting the way they
eat to become more convenient eaters. They’re disregarding the set meal times
they used to know, and starting to eat when they are free. This is a problem
because they are messing with the cream filling of their Oreo or independence
stage of life by creating bad eating habits that will stick with until they
move on to the final cookie stage of life. College students are impacted by
this change because they have little time during the week to sit down and take
an hour for dinner.
In an article
titled “What Causes the Freshman 15,” which lists causes of the weight gain
usually experienced by first year students I chose to focus on the relationship
that incoming freshman have with food rather than the outcome of weight gain.
Many of the causes have “Eating” in the title so I focused mainly on those to
see if I could understand where the different eating schedule comes from. Under
“New Eating Habits” I found:
When you’re living with
parents and going to high school, many of the details of what, when and how
much you eat are already planned out for you. Getting to college and having
unlimited choices (and limited cooking experience) can make a diet of fast
food, chips, soft drinks and pizza at 3 a.m. commonplace. (Scott)
This is the essentially the first mistake someone in the
independence stage makes. Rather than trying to maintain a healthy eating
schedule many students end up altering their schedule because they don’t know
what to do with all the freedom they’ve just been given. In college you are
free from parents and the lure to go out and party on a Monday because it’s
Karaoke Night at the bar has never been so high. Of course after you're done
singing your heart out you might want to eat late at night and then go to bed.
This is another way students are changing the way they eat because they are
demonstrating something Taco Bell calls fourth meal. Eating four meals a day
throws off your eating schedule entirely because you may not wake up hungry in
the morning from all the stored fat from the night before.
In another article titled “More
Students Eating on the Run; Dorm Food No Longer the Norm” that was written in
1996 the author focused on how college students have very little time to eat
and that when they do its usually on the run. This goes to show that even
though this article was written just over fifteen years ago, college students
still have the same problem today. Mari Lee was a student who was interviewed
for this article and explained her various eating habits. She says, “In
between, I basically graze, I might have a muffin in the afternoon and some
fruit later. . . . It depends how busy I am" (Grad). College students
everywhere are feeling what Lee feels as well. I personally know what she’s
saying. When I'm busy it’s hard to find time to eat, and other times it’s
usually just my laziness that prohibits me from eating.
Take my Tuesday and Thursday
mornings as an example. My first class starts at ten in the morning so I set an
alarm for 8:40 with the hopes to wake up not feeling tired so I can spring out
of bed to get breakfast before Nelson closes at 9:30. I have to leave a lot of
extra time because I have a habit of pressing the snooze button a few too many
times. What happens more than 50% of the time is that my alarm goes off and I
hit snooze until I can roll out of bed and walk two minutes to my hospitality
class. By skipping breakfast I’m throwing my body out of its normal schedule. I
get back from class and have an hour where I usually shower before statistics.
By the time I finish stats at 2 p.m., and haven’t eaten all day, I'm pretty
hungry so I have to wolf down a late lunch. Depending on the size lunch I eat I
may not be hungry again until 8 p.m. after the dining hall has already closed.
Being too lazy to wake and eat or too busy causes students to eat when they can
as opposed to when they want to. Katie Johansen, a nutritionist at UC Irvine’s
Student Health Center states, “A primary concern of students is time. When they
get stressed, their priority is not on eating. They tend to grab what is
convenient” (Grad). This is exactly what students everywhere are feeling. When
finals roll around, I don’t think about when I'm going to eat lunch I'm
thinking about when I'm going to study and if I can eat that’s great.
The lack of time that all
college students have leads them to change their eating habits dramatically and
shift to eating when they can. John Urry is a British sociologist and describes
this habit as the “de-synchronization of time-space paths” (Horwitz 42). At
first this sounds like something that Doc Brown would say in “Back to the
Future,” but looking back at the article, Urry precedes his statement by saying:
“The increased significance of grazing, not eating at fixed meal times in the
same place in the company of one’s family or workmates” is what leads to this de-synchronization
(Horwitz 42). This is exactly what college students are going through. By having
no set eating habits they continue to mess up the cream filling of their
metaphorical Oreo.
Due to the lack of time
college students have, their eating habits are changing. Rather than eating
when they want to, they eat whenever they can, and it usually doesn’t matter
what it is it’s still viewed as substance. A bag of chips on the way to class
can take the place of lunch sometimes and this will then result in an early
dinner and most likely a late night snack before bed. The irregularity of
eating habits is changing the way people eat to the point where they may start
to become the norm. Getting back to the idea that our lives are modeled after
an Oreo it’s clear that if you mess up the cream filling too much you wont have
much of an Oreo left. I would urge college students everywhere to stop eating
on the go because all you get after shoving your face full of dorm food is a
stomachache that lasts a few hours. If we change the way we manage our time to
accommodate the extra time we need for meals everyday we can take a big step
towards the second of our two outside Oreo cookies. College students are at the
perfect age to start creating good eating habits for when they become adults,
and I for one am going to make sure that I start eating on more of a daily
routine rather than out of convenience because I don’t want my adulthood cookie
to crumble everywhere.
Works Cited
Grad, Shelby. "More Students Eating on the Run; Dorm
Food No Longer the Norm." Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles Times, 17
Sept. 1996. Web. 23 Apr. 2012.
<http://articles.latimes.com/1996-09-17/local/me-44600_1_food-court>
Horwitz, Jamie. "Eating at the Edge." Gastronomica:
The Journal of Food and Culture 9.3 (2009): 42-47. Print.
Scott, Elizabeth. "What Causes the Freshman 15?" About.com
Stress Management. 21 Feb. 2012. Web. 23 Apr. 2012.
<http://stress.about.com/od/studentstress/a/freshman15cause.htm>
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