The Quagmire of our Dining Halls

If you’re anything like me, a long day of studying is always alleviated by going to 5cdining.com and choosing a dining hall to eat in. With choices like Taco Tuesday, Mongolian Wok, and A.M in the P.M, this can be quite the ordeal, and is only exacerbated if you’re going to eat with a group of friends. Despite the excitement with which I enter the dining hall, I am sad to say that enthusiasm is often dampened when I actually place food on my plate. Why? It is because of the judgment passed in the dining halls on a woman’s food choices.

More than once, I’ve noticed the subtle glances when a woman has multiple plates of food or a heavily laden green box. But the glances aren’t the only judgment passed. I myself have had a professor inform my friend and me that our choice of pasta was not very healthy and that “soon we would not have the grace of a fast metabolism”. Another friend of mine has had the staff at the dining hall praise her for being one of the few girls who actually fill up her green box.

We(or at least with the people I’ve eaten with) constantly feel the need to justify our food choices to each other. I’ve heard statements like “Oh…I know this is bad for me but I’ll eat it”, “I’m such a fatty for eating this”, and “I should be eating salad but I’m going to just take this pizza” countless times. These statements are often followed by laughs and general assent over the person’s “poor” food choice. This kind of group reinforcement of self-justification is harmful and can make an individual insecure over their image and choices.

In fact, most women make very few of these so-called “poor” food choices. Many stick with diets to lose weight in spite of being healthy. Why do men often eat more and (I would argue) less healthy food than women but rarely (almost never) feel self-conscious and justify their actions? It is common to explain a boy’s large appetite by saying that he is “growing”. But girls are growing and maturing, too, and despite their slower metabolism, also require a wholesome diet.

It is one thing to enforce healthy eating choices, but another to have to justify a person’s desire to eat a certain food. Women should not feel the need to explain their food choices, nor should other people comment on these choices. Eating healthy is an important and vital aspect of an individual’s well-being, but it should not be something that peers and others can impose. Ideally, no judgment, both positive and negative, should be passed in the dining hall. No one should be commended for eating a salad or grimaced at for grabbing a side of fries. I should be able to pick between pizza or quinoa based on what I truly want and not by the judgments of other people.

Aish Subramanian