Green Options

 
Finals are fast approaching on college campuses.  It’s the time of the semester when students put themselves on “lockdown” to study for comprehensive exams, write papers, or finally tackle that half-page reading list. 
Since I’ve been in college, I’ve noticed that most students adopt terrible lifestyle habits before and during finals.  They don’t sleep, skip showers, and wear the same clothes (usually pajamas) several days in a row.  But the most notorious bad habit I’ve noticed is horrifically unhealthy snacking.  I’ve seen students walk into the library with a grocery sack of Cheetos, Twizzlers, Oreos, beef jerky and Red Bulls and devour the whole spread.  I love junk food just as much as the next person, but that’s just gross.

Hmmm…eggs. Incredible. Edible.

Many college students like eggs because they provide a cheap, fast and (If prepared correctly) tasty meal. I like eggs for all of those reasons too. Since I have been in school,  I have found them to be reliable for curing both morning and evening hunger.

I also like eggs because they pack a nutritional punch. According to the American Egg Board, one large egg provides six grams of protein; the quality of egg protein is so high that scientists frequently use eggs as the standard for measuring the protein quality of other foods. Eggs are also much lower in fat than many people think (one large egg has 4.5 grams of fat and 75 calories). In addition, eggs have recently begun to shed their rep as heart-clotters because scientists have yet to show that dietary cholesterol (the kind in eggs) significantly boosts blood cholesterol levels in everyone.

When I was a kid, my mom would serve dinner around six-thirty in the evening, seven at the latest. At this time, the sky was still burnt orange and the prime-time sitcoms were just starting to buzz in our living room. After we finished eating, my mom would clean up, and my sister and I would work on homework or play until it was time to take a bath. Most nights, I was in bed by nine.

I can’t remember the last time I ate an evening dinner. Now, my typical dinner time is nine, long after the sky has turned black and the warm sitcom characters on my TV screen have been replaced by frigid local news anchors. My bedtime has also been adjusted, and now hovers around one in the morning. Between those two times, depending how restless I am or how much work I need to finish, dinner might not be the last time I eat before sunrise—I might grab a snack, or even go full throttle and have “fourth meal” (For the record, Taco Bell did not invent the fourth meal. Coeds across America have been slinging around that term for years.).

The state of Wisconsin has long served as the national focal point of all things dairy.  However, Wisconsin is also the epicenter of another American food culture niche, and that is alcohol.

My oh my, do people in Wisconsin love to drink. I live the capitol city of Madison and, at least once every weekend, I see snapshot of that state-bred love, either through an embarrassingly sloshed University of Wisconsin undergraduate or a too-tipsy townie. When I found out the actual statistics— that Wisconsin has the highest percentage of drinkers in the population and that, person for person, the state has three times more taverns than anywhere else in the country—I hardly blinked.

Still, I’ll admit that sometimes I find Madison’s hyper-boozing culture to be intimidating. At a lot of college parties, my three-drink limit is everyone else’s warm-up drill, and I’ve met more than a few Badgers whose Thirsty Thursday extends through Wednesday night. However, I’ve never tried to keep up with the crowd. I’m sure some of my peers think it’s lame that my personal bar time is midnight, and not two a.m., but I bet I look a lot cooler the next morning when I haven’t succumbed to their same fate: the head-stinging, stomach-churning, regret-inducing experience that is the hangover.

Since I’ve been in college, my morning routine has remained pretty consistent: wake up, brush my teeth, make some coffee, get dressed, make my bed, collect my school things, fill up my thermos with brew, and go. The whole she-bang takes about an hour. The last step, in which I am walking out the door, is usually when I have an oh yeah moment, and remember that I should eat something. That’s when I grab some Pop-Tarts and run to class.

Even though I eat them for breakfast regularly, I think that Pop-Tarts are a lousy meal. The pastry is bone dry, the filling is overly sweet, and the frosting resembles old, flaking nail polish. I also find Pop-Tarts to be extremely unsatisfying—even when I eat more than one, I feel like I am lightly snacking at best. To make matters worse, I am unsatisfying myself with a lot of empty calories: two tarts (one package) offers 400 calories, 10 grams of fat, and little nutritional value.

Like a lot of the foods in my diet, I’ve been eating Pop-Tarts because they are cheap and convenient. But because breakfast is such a vital part of my day, I’ve decided to start improving the quality of the meal, even if that means investing a little more of my time and money.

Lately, I’ve been craving a lot of comfort foods. Warm soothers like oatmeal, grits, tea, hot chocolate, soup, and mac and cheese have become my go-to snacks and meals. I sense that I’m doing this in response to the fall weather. I live in Madison, WI and, while I’m used to it being chilly in October, it has been unseasonably frigid outside. In addition, I feel that I’m eating so many comfort foods because they offer me short-term relief from my mid-semester avalanche of personal stress.

According to the 2008 National Coffee Drinking Trends Summary, young adults (age 18-24) who drink coffee consume an average of 3.2 cups a day. I completely represent this statistic. I often drink multiple cups of coffee in the morning to get me going, and sometimes require a booster cup in the afternoon to keep up my momentum. Most of the college students and young professionals that I know have a similar routine. For most us, coffee is not a want, but a need: it makes us more alert, and it helps to be more focused and productive when we study or tackle a project.
I’ve tried to reduce my daily coffee intake, and even quit, because coffee stains my teeth an lingers on my breath far longer than I’d like it to. However, I always wave the white flag after 48 hours and, with twitching hands, exhume my coffee pot from the depths of my pantry so that I can get my caffeine fix. Addiction is rough.

I really, really don’t like Ramen noodles.  To me, Ramen smells like paste.  It looks like tapeworms.  It tastes like seasoned gummy cardboard, and it leaves behind an aftertaste that’s ten times worse than what I experience while it’s actually in my mouth.  I’ve tried to dress it up with different meats, vegetables and sauces, but that never seems to improve things.  Also, I can never get full on just one package, so I always end up eating three, and then wind up feeling cramped and bloated, laying on my couch cursing Nissin, Maruchan, and any other corporation responsible for mass producing the inedible noodle bricks that I somehow  just made edible.
If the world was kind, then Ramen would offer me some health benefits to compensate for its disgustingness.  However, the product offers little nutritional value.  To make matters worse, one package of chicken-flavored Ramen (about two servings) is loaded with sodium—71% of the recommended daily amount.
Ramen is terrible. TERRIBLE.  I see it as a crime against the human body and the culinary arts.  However, these crimes never seem to matter to me, and I eat Ramen time and time again, because it’s quick and easy.  It’s also dirt cheap; to my knowledge, it’s the only meal in existence that I can literally buy on a dime.

This morning for breakfast, I had a Pop-Tart and a diet soda.
For lunch, I had a “just add water” box noodle meal and a diet soda.
Right now, as I sit here typing, I am having a late-night dinner of a cold pastrami sandwich, frosted animal crackers, and black coffee.
In case you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m a college student. This is my third year in graduate school, and the seventh of my (seemingly endless) college career. I’m ashamed to admit this, but if I had kept a food diary over the past seven years, most of the entries would read a lot like the aforementioned “meals”.