I've learned from past mistakes and on my most recent road to self improvement, I've decided I'm not taking the heavy-handed hardcore diet approach. (I mean, the last time I was in bed with That Man he ran his hand over my stomach and told me to go back to the kitchen and down a few more slices of pizza. What more motivation does a girl need to NOT diet quite so fiercely?) However, after subsequently falling off the wagon completely, I am definitely interested in being a little less mushy, and definitely more healthy.
I've been shopping for healthier food, and cooking a lot more, which is all well and good. I've tried to go back to drinking more water and tea, and not overdosing on snack foods. This works out pretty well for me, with one giant exception - my school's cafeteria.
For anyone who has ever tried to diet, or at least maintain healthy eating habits, you probably know that making healthy choices that taste good is enough of a challenge when you've got a wide variety of foods at your disposal. In a school cafeteria, this becomes nearly impossible.
One of the first issues comes in with the food served from behind the counters. For starters, there is no such thing as portion control. You get whatever the person behind the counter scoops onto your plate, even if it's more or less than the suggested serving size - and more often than not, it's more. I watch them heap pasta onto plates, slather rolls with mayonnaise and pile cheese and turkey high on sandwiches - which, for how much they charge us for this food, is probably good, but as far as eating healthy portions, is a disaster.
As if it's not bad enough that you have no idea how much you're eating (most people do not know how to approximate a proper serving size), none of the food is marked with any sort of nutritional information. I'm sure that the information could be provided to you if requested, but if you've seen my cafeteria during peak eating hours, you'd know that waiting around until someone is free to get you that information is pretty pointless.
Based on the food that they serve, I'd guess that the food in my cafeteria has high sodium and fat contents, and a pretty poor balance of carbs, proteins, and vegetables. They always have vegetarian options, but rarely are they an option that has any nutritional value (pasta and marinara sauce, baked ziti, etc.), and vegetables that are served as sides are often not the best from a dietary perspective (corn, potatoes) or are something that too few students will even bother with (brussel sprouts). Not exactly helpful. I'm not even going to mention what comes out of the grill (though they finally, FINALLY serve veggie burgers on a consistent basis - thank goodness!).
Perhaps worse than the food behind the counter though, are the prepackaged foods available. First off, if you want a snack, prepare to throw 200 of your daily calories down the tube at the very least, because that's the lowest I've seen on any bag of chips or cereal or candy bar offered. The fat content is even worse. They stopped carrying Special K bars in favor of Cinnabon's line of cereal bars. The breakfast pastries are so full of sugar that I don't know how you can eat them and not crash shortly after. Refrigerators are filled with fake fruit juices and energy drinks. You can even purchase a pint of Ben & Jerry's ice cream out of the freezer. And yet, finding a bag of pretzels, or a piece of fresh fruit that is actually ripe, and not bruised beyond belief is nearly impossible. We do have a selection of salads, but sadly, no healthy dressing options.
I know I sound like I'm taking a totality elitist and holier-than-thou look at my cafeteria, but really, with obesity rates on the rise, I look at an environment like that and all I can say is "Do you really wonder WHY?" I mean, really, we're not even giving our young people a CHANCE. It's such a challenge to make the healthier choice in a place that has limited your options so much, and when you're on the run in between classes, you're going to grab whatever you can down the fastest, regardless of the calories involved. I know, I've been there. It's ten times easier for me to grab a fruit juice and a cereal bar than it is for me to sit down, make a cup of tea, and scoop my fat free yogurt into one of their to-go bowls of Cheerios, but I think we all know which one is the healthier breakfast.
Grabbing a fat free yogurt and an English Muffin with peanut butter or light cream cheese is getting extremely redundant to me and I'm going nuts, but having so many textbooks to carry, I am reluctant to bring more food than I already do. (I generally bring my own oatmeal to make in a coffee cup, and some sort of snack).
Is your cafeteria a diet disaster? Do you find eating right harder when you're subject to the selection of a college or high school cafeteria? Does your cafeteria have loads of healthy choices for you to choose from? Do you think that the meals that children and young adults are getting at school are having a serious effect on their eating habits?
~Jessica
Friday, February 5, 2010
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Generation Obnoxious, Entitled, Helpless
Throughout my trip to London, I was always frustrated by the behavior of a lot of the people who were on the trip with me. However, as I started breaking away from the group and traveling on my own, and even as I got back home, I came to the sad realization, that it isn't a couple of brats on my trip, it's a generation-wide epidemic.
I don't really know at what point proper conduct and behavior deteriorated, but it has. I remember as my grade was coming up through the public school system, teachers were shocked and appalled by the slew of behavioral issues they were forced to address. We were quickly dubbed the worst grade the school had seen. And it only got worse when the next few years came up behind us.
I look around today, and I realize something very sad: we haven't gotten any better. We haven't grown up. We're in our 20's now, and we're still the obnoxious, bratty, entitled, irresponsible, helpless behavioral disasters we were back in school. We are loud, and we are rude, and we think the world revolves around us.
When I was in London, a lot of the people I was with would just walk up to people on the street, interrupt their conversations, and ask for directions without so much as an "Excuse me", "Please", or "Thank you". On a train ride back from Oxford, there was a group of people who looked to be about my age spread out along one side of the train car who spent the entire trip shouting over people to their friends across the car. This kind of behavior just shows such a disregard for the people around you, like your conversation and well-being is more important than theirs.
I have no problem calling out the next set of behavioral disasters specifically by school, because I think their high-and-mighty demeanor deserves to be taken down a peg. Now, I thought the behavior of MY classmates left a lot to be desired. However, we were NOTHING compared to the group of students who came in towards the end of our trip from NYU. Rude doesn't even begin to cover it. Within the first 2 days of them being there, all of the common areas had been trashed. Every single table in the cafe and lounge area was covered with trash, from empty McDonald's bags and wrappers to cans of beer and bottles of wine, and every other sort of food garbage you could imagine. I could not believe how poorly they treated the space, and how they have absolutely NO respect for the rest of us that they had to share the space with. I was so disgusted.
Now I know this doesn't apply to all of us, all of the time, but I think if you look around at your peers, you'll see the people I'm talking about.
There's also this overwhelming sense of entitlement. We act like we deserve to have everything given to us. I think this goes hand in hand with viewing our well-being as more important than anyone else's. And I'll say something here that is something I know I struggle with - we don't have any sort of automatic respect for authority. I will call out a professor on their mistakes or botch-ups regardless of the fact that they are an authority figure - if they have not earned my respect, I will not give it to them. The most recent example is a professor I have who yells, snaps, and claps at us as if we were dogs needing to be trained. I do not respect her, despite the fact that I am supposed to because she's my professor.
We're struck by this cloud of apathy that seems to hover over us at all times. For many of us, we haven't ever had to fight for anything, or believe in anything, or strive for anything, because there's nothing for us to fight for or believe in or strive for. The fact that the world is at war means so little to so many of us, because it's such a distant threat that on a good day, we can forget about it, if we're not there. We seem to have so little passion.
And yet, at the end of the day, I can almost start to feel bad for us. I look at the problems my generation is inheriting, and I almost don't blame people for acting out. Many of us are going to graduate college with a huge amount of debt already, and be thrust into a job market that is floundering. We aren't being adequately prepared for life, and so we're being thrown out into the world, helpless, and now with bad manners and poor attitudes on top of everything else. We're getting screwed over by governments, and the mistakes of generations before us that are leaving us in more and more debt, and with more things we are responsible to fix. But does that excuse our behavior? I don't think so.
What do you think of the generation that you are a part of? Does it embarrass you to be a part of your generation, or are you proud of them? Do you wish you had grown up in a different generation? How do you think you would be different if you had?
~Jessica
I don't really know at what point proper conduct and behavior deteriorated, but it has. I remember as my grade was coming up through the public school system, teachers were shocked and appalled by the slew of behavioral issues they were forced to address. We were quickly dubbed the worst grade the school had seen. And it only got worse when the next few years came up behind us.
I look around today, and I realize something very sad: we haven't gotten any better. We haven't grown up. We're in our 20's now, and we're still the obnoxious, bratty, entitled, irresponsible, helpless behavioral disasters we were back in school. We are loud, and we are rude, and we think the world revolves around us.
When I was in London, a lot of the people I was with would just walk up to people on the street, interrupt their conversations, and ask for directions without so much as an "Excuse me", "Please", or "Thank you". On a train ride back from Oxford, there was a group of people who looked to be about my age spread out along one side of the train car who spent the entire trip shouting over people to their friends across the car. This kind of behavior just shows such a disregard for the people around you, like your conversation and well-being is more important than theirs.
I have no problem calling out the next set of behavioral disasters specifically by school, because I think their high-and-mighty demeanor deserves to be taken down a peg. Now, I thought the behavior of MY classmates left a lot to be desired. However, we were NOTHING compared to the group of students who came in towards the end of our trip from NYU. Rude doesn't even begin to cover it. Within the first 2 days of them being there, all of the common areas had been trashed. Every single table in the cafe and lounge area was covered with trash, from empty McDonald's bags and wrappers to cans of beer and bottles of wine, and every other sort of food garbage you could imagine. I could not believe how poorly they treated the space, and how they have absolutely NO respect for the rest of us that they had to share the space with. I was so disgusted.
Now I know this doesn't apply to all of us, all of the time, but I think if you look around at your peers, you'll see the people I'm talking about.
There's also this overwhelming sense of entitlement. We act like we deserve to have everything given to us. I think this goes hand in hand with viewing our well-being as more important than anyone else's. And I'll say something here that is something I know I struggle with - we don't have any sort of automatic respect for authority. I will call out a professor on their mistakes or botch-ups regardless of the fact that they are an authority figure - if they have not earned my respect, I will not give it to them. The most recent example is a professor I have who yells, snaps, and claps at us as if we were dogs needing to be trained. I do not respect her, despite the fact that I am supposed to because she's my professor.
We're struck by this cloud of apathy that seems to hover over us at all times. For many of us, we haven't ever had to fight for anything, or believe in anything, or strive for anything, because there's nothing for us to fight for or believe in or strive for. The fact that the world is at war means so little to so many of us, because it's such a distant threat that on a good day, we can forget about it, if we're not there. We seem to have so little passion.
And yet, at the end of the day, I can almost start to feel bad for us. I look at the problems my generation is inheriting, and I almost don't blame people for acting out. Many of us are going to graduate college with a huge amount of debt already, and be thrust into a job market that is floundering. We aren't being adequately prepared for life, and so we're being thrown out into the world, helpless, and now with bad manners and poor attitudes on top of everything else. We're getting screwed over by governments, and the mistakes of generations before us that are leaving us in more and more debt, and with more things we are responsible to fix. But does that excuse our behavior? I don't think so.
What do you think of the generation that you are a part of? Does it embarrass you to be a part of your generation, or are you proud of them? Do you wish you had grown up in a different generation? How do you think you would be different if you had?
~Jessica
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