Serveries enact welcome new focus on health

By Staff Editorial     4/22/10 7:00pm

Rice Dining Services has slowly but steadily been reducing salt, saturated fat and added sugar in our servery food for the last half of the semester (see story, page 10). Although the shift has been all but imperceptible in terms of taste, it represents a drastic change for student health.We at the Thresher will readily admit that as students, we all eat poorly. We drink too much, snack too much and gorge ourselves late at night on junk food. Although we all know we should eat better, our general eating habits are not likely to change any time soon.

The change in the composition of servery food, however, targets what should be the base of the student diet. Servery food is the closest thing we have to home-cooked meals in our diets, and we are pleased to know that its nutritional content is beginning to resemble Mom's cooking more than Chef Boyardee's. Less sugar, less salt, less fat and less processing are something parents everywhere strive for.

However, we're concerned about some of the changes most parents would recoil at, such as the use of artificial sweeteners. Although the new sugar substitute that will soon appear in servery desserts, stevia, has received FDA approval, many other calorie-free sweeteners that preceded it also received this recognition, only to be subsequently linked to cancer, birth defects and other ailments.

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We hope servery food will remain as flavorful as it has always been with these nutritional changes, and we hope that increasing student health can be achieved by moving toward a more natural diet, one free of additives and processing whenever possible.

Lastly, while we thank the servery staff for their many efforts to offer healthier food and educate students on nutrition, we know that this is only half the battle. We, the student body, might also have to buckle down, occasionally choosing eggplant over Easy Mac. You can cook eggplant in a microwave, right?

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