Not Only Ramen: a food budget for students
College is a great time for young adults who live away from home for the first time to learn how to budget and prepare meals for themselves. Campus programs are here to help.
Cooking on Campus class in Spring 2020 was held in Outdoor Recreation Center of the University of Arizona.
“We can turn on our stovetops,” says a student chef who turns on fire and looks over to the other 12 students, who came on Tuesday evening to Outdoor Recreation Center for cooking class.
On February 18, one of the last classes before the COVID-19 pandemic, students were learning how to batch cook. The ingredients for turkey taco bowl, lime-cilantro brown rice, and citrus fruit salad are neatly organized on a tray, next to one stove cooking top, knives and cutting boards. Steel cooking tables make the square, so every student can see the demonstration table and other cooking.
The University of Arizona has two programs to educate students on how to prepare healthy and nutritious meals: the cooking demonstration class, Dorm Room Eats, and the hands-on Cooking on Campus. Both programs are student-driven and planned, says Christy Wilson, who serves as an adviser for both programs.
“My role as the adviser is to guide the students to create a schedule of classes, and to create those classes for our specific audience, which are college students.” Wilson is a registered dietician nutritionist and a nutrition counselor at the University of Arizona’s Campus Health service. Students’ needs to be considered include tight budgets, limited opportunities for grocery shopping since many don’t have cars, and limited cooking options if only microwave is available to them.
The class menu, however, is not limited to salads or sandwiches. Students are taught multiple techniques, including frying and sauteing.
“I want the students to enjoy the act of cooking and preparing their own meal or snack,” Wilson says. The hope is that they take this information and they take this experience and they go to their own home, wherever that is, and feel inspired to make this again for themselves on a regular basis.”
Every cooking class includes the preparation of three dishes students can take home.
The admission to Campus Cooking class costs $7 and the number of participants is limited to 18 students. The money, according to Wilson, covers the food they cook and eat there or take home with them. “We rarely spend more than $80 for the full class, ” she says.
Wilson said to keep food costs low the program combines seasonal produce with dry ingredients like rice, pasta and beans while also using canned and frozen ingredients. A low budget, however, doesn’t mean low nutritional value.
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans have rediscovered cooking and baking. Bread makers sales have skyrocketed together with the search frequency of “how to make bread”. More than half of the people surveyed by HUNTER, a food and beverage communications firm, said they were cooking more and 46% were baking despite the growing demand for delivery services, which resulted also in growing confidence in the kitchen. Despite the growing demand for delivery services during social isolation, many said that they will continue to prepare home meals after the pandemic. Leading reasons for that: money-saving and eating healthier.
Indeed, cooking home is associated with a more nutritionally dense diet.
“There seems to be negative bias against produce that's in a can or in a frozen bag, when in fact these food items are harvested and placed into a can or into a frozen package within hours of it being picked,” Wilson says. “So these foods are not lacking in nutrition. They're not lacking in flavor either. They are just an old fashioned way of extending the shelf life of these particular foods.” Cheap ingredients worth limiting would be highly processed foods with a huge amount of sugar and sodium, she says.
“Salt and sugar are not expensive ingredients. When those items are 99 cents a box, it's very tempting. But if you take enough of those items, let's say you're taking five items for 99 cents and it seems like a great bargain, but if you were to choose something that is of a higher quality with that same $5, you would win in the long run healthwise,” she says.
The key to mastering cooking, she says, is education and practice. “The barrier is being exposed to the information on how to put ingredients together in a way that still tastes good because that's the number one driver, right? If it tastes good, I'll eat it again. If it doesn't taste good, no matter how healthy it is, I probably won't eat it,” its Campus Cooking classes, the university is trying to teach students tasty and nutritious recipes that they would prefer to eating out.