All You Can Eat or All You Should Eat?: The Dining Halls as a Source of Campus Obesity

Shane Le Master

One can walk into the dining halls on Georgia Tech’s campus and see a smorgasbord of things like a pasta bar, a pizza bar, an ice cream bar, and even a dessert corner complete with an ice cream machine. For the sake of wetting people’s appetites and retaining business (i.e. keeping students on the meal plan), the school has created dining halls with a menu consisting of all the yummy sugary, fatty, and carbohydrate-filled foods that one could ever want. However, in this pursuit, they forgot that the health of the students is more of a concern than their taste-buds. As a good parent would never sustain their baby on a diet of Twinkies and Pop-tarts, the school, too, needs to realize there are problems with its current dining hall menu and that they do more harm than good by serving up foods that taste good as opposed to foods that do good.

So widespread is the occurrence of weight gain by college students, the “freshman 15” (referring to how students often report gaining 15 pounds their freshman year) has now become ubiquitous in most minds with college life. Article after article, including this one by CNN, associate the primary cause of this unhealthy weight gain with the all-you-can eat, carbohydrate filled foods found in campus dining halls. While personal discipline does play a major part in managing health, it is often not enough. For many students where Georgia Tech meal plans are the only affordable and convenient food option, they should not have to walk into a dining hall filled with so many irresistible and fattening options. And though some healthy choices are offered, stress and time constraints can push even the best of us to reach for a greasy piece of pizza. And as according to a University of New Hampshire study where at least a third of college students are obese, it is unbecoming to see the university ignoring these alarming facts and continuing its current practices in the dining halls. Getting rid of the myriad of unhealthy foods would be the best thing the school could do for its students.

The college’s goal is to prepare its students for the next stage in their lives by giving them a good education as well as opportunities to learn how to handle independence and personal responsibility. However, it seems to be forgetting the importance of the students’ health by giving them the chance to develop sickening eating habits. The unhealthy foods that fill the dining halls can be seen as a tacit approval by the school of unhealthy eating. Instead of focusing on what will increase meal plan customers, the school should return to the basics and look after the genuine wellbeing of its students. In the future, instead of seeing the common picture of an obese student walking out with ice cream cones, it would be nice to see healthy students walking out of the dining hall eating carrot sticks.