College is hard for a lot of reasons, but no one can prepare you for how hard it can be to stay healthy. Achieving balance between studying, working, staying social, exercising, and eating healthy is something I am constantly working towards. When there’s no one there to make your lunch for you and remind you to eat breakfast before going to school, it’s easy to neglect diet and health. For something we do (hopefully) three or more times a day, eating well can be a struggle. In college it becomes acceptable to justify a diet consisting of frozen dinners made in the microwave, dining hall food that makes you feel sick, or just having a granola bar all day between your internship and classes. It can feel like the norm to be unhappy with what you’re eating.
This problem is only challenged by all of the misconceptions about nutrition and health. What does “going on a diet” even mean? What does “I’m going to start eating healthy tomorrow” mean? Low carb, ketogenic, paleo, vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, alkaline, low fat, raw, plant-based, zone, South Beach, Atkins. More than ever before, people are questioning what the ideal healthy diet looks like. Just a walk through the aisles of a grocery store is confusing. Organic, natural, non-GMO, infused, enriched, low sodium, low fat, reduced, lite. The food industry does a great job of complicating our understanding of what eating “healthy” means. That’s why going back to basics and learning to cook is the simplest way to eat healthy.
This phenomenon is a new problem. Before food became an industry, people ate what they found, grew, and cooked themselves. There were no questions about eating too much fat or not enough protein; people just ate what they could make. The industrialization of food in the mid-1900s liberated people from spending all day food shopping and cooking. However, the consequence has been people losing the basic yet vital skill of cooking. They have also lost the opportunity for that skill to be passed on. This shift, along with great marketing, normalized substituting processed, packaged, and preserved food for the real stuff. It’s been so long since people actually needed to cook to survive that many of us have developed a fear of cooking. This fear, in addition to the constraints of time and money, make it hard to get back in the kitchen. Cook food you enjoy with ingredients you recognize and can pronounce and you can’t go wrong. Cooking frees you from having to worry if something is really “healthy” or not and puts the power back in your own hands.
Of course, just saying “cook” is not so simple. For so many people, including college students, the act of cooking is complicated by lack of access to real food, time-consuming and low-paying jobs, demanding schedules, and lack of knowledge about cooking. There’s no easy remedy to these problems. For now, I want to contribute to the solution by producing information that makes cooking easier and more accessible. I guess that’s why I consider myself a food wonk.
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