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Tuesday, June 19, 2012 By Alexandra Hehlen
 Campus life offers a variety of eating choices, including some healthy dining options as well as less healthy, but more common snack foods. - Alexandra Hehlen
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Cooking for guests can be a daunting task. Now try more than 2,000 guests and a few picky eaters.
Chef Shawn Weed faces this every day on the University of New Mexico (UNM) main campus. He met his match when an angry foreign exchange student from the sub-Saharan desert in Africa stormed into his kitchen. This foreign guest taught Weed that the food of one culture can seem outlandish to another. Weed, a head chef at UNM, was faced with a perplexing dilemma: the exchange student disliked all of the cuisine on campus.
“None of the food looked familiar to him,” Weed said. “We made it unrecognizable. I taught him how to put things together. He started opening up to the food.”
The exchange student not only became exposed to a new food culture, but also learned how to make responsible choices
pertaining to what he consumed. Students who have been exclusively exposed only to one type of cuisine face similar issues.
Some college freshmen gain weight, called the “Freshmen Fifteen,” in their first year at university because of unhealthy eating habits.
“This is a lot of students’ first opportunity to choose what they eat. Just because we have this offering of healthy items doesn’t mean they’ll eat them,” Weed said. “We see their eating habits change. Food is a low-priority to them.”
A day of college goes by fast, so students pressed for time eat fast food, hungry for a filling bite of empty calories.
“We (students) have seen such a change in our attitude toward food,” said Megan Townsley, a Resident Advisor at UNM. A frequent customer at Satellite Coffee and the Co-op, Townsley is a minority. “I usually cook everything myself. It does require a lot of planning. A lot of students just don’t have that kind of time.”
Weed, who works at restaurants campuswide, asserted a broad variety of cuisine is offered to students on campus. From a selection of Asian, American, Mexican and Italian cookery, students have the opportunity to make healthy choices about what they consume. Yet more than 75 percent of students will choose unhealthy meals over healthier alternatives, according to Weed.
He is on a constant crash-course with his students, monitoring the foods they buy and throw away. This helps him formulate his own menu catered specifically to students’
tastes. He said his primary concern is making the best quality food.
Students can spend hours in dining halls and food courts socializing, where they can pile up their plates multiple times without noticing how much they are actually
eating.
UNM student Mike Schneider keeps a healthy diet. To avoid gaining weight in college he advocates planning ahead, not overeating and to stop eating when not hungry.
“In the long run, it’s going to be worth the time,” Schneider said.
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