Sharing that I’d gotten into Brown prompted a range of reactions from the adults in my life. My dad cried. (“You deserved Harvard!”) My mom cried. (“I’m so proud of you!”) My manager at the SAT hagwon I worked at, however, had advice on his mind. “Be careful of the freshman 15,” he warned. “It sneaks up on you fast.”
Many students arrive on campus with knowledge of how to fuel themselves well. Many, on the other hand, do not. A study of college students found that over the course of four years, the number of participants classified as overweight or obese increased from 18% to 31% — gains in absolute fat were highest during the students’ first year. At least part of the problem lies in what we don’t eat. A 2018 survey by the American College Health Association found that 95.8% of college students do not consume enough fruits and vegetables, whose high water and fiber contents have been shown to slow digestion, steady blood sugar levels and help us feel full for longer. Suddenly, all the alarm in the media about colon cancer in young people seems to be right in our backyard.
To be fair, Brown tries to help. Meal plans are mandatory for all first-years and sophomores, and students from families with high financial need receive additional funds to cover their plans. Ease of access to dining halls means ease of access to fruits and greens. At Andrews Commons, for instance, you can stock up on a selection of apples, bananas and oranges free of charge. Josiah’s takes a different approach, packaging “hand fruits” into bundles with more enticing offerings. With this method, students are incentivized to pair their fries with a Fuji. These are commendable measures: 18.8% of undergraduates at private non-profit four-year colleges experience some form of food insecurity, which has been found to drive low fruit and vegetable consumption. Every student should be able to eat healthy, and I’m thankful that Brown has made a commitment to this cause.
I’d like to venture, however, that a bigger part of the problem — and the part of the problem left unaddressed by the University — is that not every student knows how to eat healthy. The general university food environment is characterized by food outlets on campus, a relatively fixed variety of options and proximity to other students. Even students who come to campus knowing how to eat well can find their eating habits quickly derailed by this environment. This is especially true of students from different cultural backgrounds, who can rush to take up what they perceive to be local fare — often higher in sugar and processed foods than their diets back home — in an effort to fit in. Further, students from lower-income backgrounds may arrive at university less prepared to create healthy eating habits. The list of potential complicating factors is long: forms of neurodivergence, struggles with time management and eating disorders can all play a role.
When I came to Brown, I was a diagnosed anorexic. It was a period of my life deficient both in nutrients and in self-respect. My own formulation of the credo ran something like this: as I am now, I am not worth much to anyone, so let me thin myself down so I can be worth something to someone. My goal was to make friends, and to eat for this goal meant not to eat. I brought with me to Brown this flawed idea of how to “eat right,” whereupon Brown’s eating culture put stress on that flaw and splintered it into an acute crisis.
It took me maybe half a day of orientation week socializing to realize that at Brown, meeting people meant eating with people. Since everyone was on a meal plan, hang-outs defaulted to grabbing a meal at the Sharpe Refectory. I turned down many invites from people whose friendships I still regret letting lapse because I just couldn’t trust myself to put together a plate at a buffet. I remember experiencing a critical dissonance between the part of me that wanted to spend time with my friends and the part of me that felt I would die if I went with them to the Ice Cream Social. If I had struggled with self-respect before, I felt cleanly bled of it now.
I wish that someone had told me, then, that it is okay to be confused about how to eat for the life I wanted to make for myself; that learning how to eat right is a difficult step in many students’ transition to adulthood; and that the food culture at Brown — so inextricably bound up with its friend-making practices — can complicate things even further. I wish I could have understood sooner that I was not alone in needing to teach myself how to navigate this environment.
Because I was not, in fact, alone. And if you’re experiencing any kind of disconnect between your way of eating and the kind of life you want to make for yourself at Brown, I’m here to tell you that you’re not behind, either. The first year of university can represent a tipping point in establishing lifestyle patterns that persist into adulthood: you are malleable, but the lessons you learn are enduring.
In other words, your first year at Brown is the perfect time to start figuring out your goals — and to start to teach yourself how to eat for those goals, too.
Chandler Ahn ’29 can be reached at geumbee_ahn@brown.edu. Please send responses to this column to letters@browndailyherald.com and other opinions to opinions@browndailyherald.edu.
