When I made my first visit to Colgate University for admitted students last spring, I thought eating meals in the dining halls was something I could look forward to. In high school, I tended to bring lunch from home, and when I did get lunch from school, pizza and a single entrée were usually the only options available. With what I had come to expect from school lunches, I was pretty thrilled at the prospect of getting to access a Coca-Cola Freestyle machine for free at every meal. On that first visit, I decided to play it safe with my first meal and ate the pizza at Frank Dining Hall. Little did I know how indicative that would be of my future meal choices at Colgate.
When I officially started at Colgate in August, I did not pay much attention to how I was eating in general. After the meals on my Wilderness Adventure — mostly trail mix and peanut butter and jelly tortillas — I was just happy to be eating proper meals again. My diet consisted mostly of the foods I would get when out with friends back at home like burgers, pizza and of course Coop sushi. At the start, it felt like I was eating at a restaurant every night, getting to choose my favorite foods at every meal. I did not understand why I had heard complaints about the food at Colgate.
However, within a few weeks of starting class, I began to realize that my diet had become pretty stagnant. The initial luster of being able to eat daily foods that I had previously only eaten once a week quickly wore off. Those meals stopped feeling as special as they were when I would go out to eat with friends in high school. I quickly became bored with what I was eating at Frank Dining Hall, even though I added fruits and vegetables to my meals to stay healthy. Several days a week, I would even skip breakfast (something I had never done before college) so that I would be able to sleep more before my morning classes. Yet, with all of the adjustments of starting college, I could not focus on improving my diet.
When I returned home from college over fall break, it gave me a new perspective on why I was not satisfied with the food I had at Colgate. When I was a kid, my mother would cook daily homemade meals that were not just balanced nutritionally, but also had variety. Variety was what I was missing at Colgate. I was eating meals that I liked, but I was only sticking with what I knew and eating the same foods on a rotation. I was getting the same drinks from the Starbucks in Frank, the same sandwiches from Chobani that I would get for myself at home. The frequency with which I had these meals took away their special quality.
Now, I have been making an effort to try as many different foods as I can from our dining halls. Despite how much I enjoy hamburgers, I tried a veggie burger for the first time and found it to be a decent substitute. I make an effort to take time to grab a filling breakfast. Moving away from the yogurt bar at Frank, I set out to create a breakfast containing foods from every part of the dining hall. I’ve been doing the same for my other meals too, checking out the entrée section of the dining halls more and more, trying to not eat the same meal two days in a row.
What all of this amounts to is that I have been able to keep my diet more varied even with the few dining halls we have at Colgate, not to mention the off-campus restaurants that exist in Hamilton and beyond. It is one thing to eat a balanced meal, but it is another to eat a variety of meals, and that is what I think a lot of my fellow first-years miss out on when dining at Colgate. You can eat purely the foods that you like, or purely the ones that you think are healthiest, but if you do not branch out and try all the options available, you will not get the full extent of what Colgate dining has to offer.
