Top Green College Cafeterias:

1. Yale
2. Duke
3. UC Berkley
4. College of Atlantic
5. Evergreen State College
6. Berea College
7. Middlebury College
8. Waren Wilson College
9. University of Washington
10. Oberlin College
11. Bates College
12. California State University-Chico

Where is TCU? All of these universities are going green by overhauling big named food services by buying local, catering to vegetarians, composting waste, and saving energy.

USA TODAY ARTICLE: More University Students Call For Organic, Sustainable Food

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2006-09-26-college-food-usat_x.htm

In the USA article above it talks about how a student named Grant chose Yale over Harvard not because of the university, but because of the sustainable and organic food options they offered at the university. Colleges nationwide are starting to by more food from local farms. Why not TCU?  About 80% of students surveyed at Yale said they'd eat in the dining hale more if it had more sustainable and organic food options. Some students are even going as far to planting their own vegetables in their backyards. I think it is understandable for large universities with hundreds of thousands of students to have a large food distributor, but TCU? TCU needs to jump on the band wagon with other accredited private universities and start buying form local farmers instead of these large food companies.

TCU BLUU Food Comes From Sodexo

I remember when my friend told me "TCU students pay over $40,000 a year for school and eat the same type of food people eat in prison." I just thought she was being a dramatic snob when she said that because I really didn't think the food was THAT bad, but she actually is right.

TCU gets mass amounts of shipments of food that they serve to students everyday from Sodexo. On the TCU dining services website they talk all about Sodexo and how they provide the food for the students. Although this is a very well known company, their has been a lot of controversy about the quality of food this company provides and illness that has broken out in the past. Sodexo is one of the largest food distribution companies in the world. However,  there have been boycotts on several campuses of Sodexo for various reasons. So maybe my friend wasn't just being dramatic? For students to be paying as much as they are paying to go to TCU, shouldn't we get what we are paying for? Absolutely.

Help For Students

As I've been researching for my website I cam across tips for staying healthy in college. This opened the idea of instead of just having why eating should be implementing on campus and how TCU can make it happen, I also want to have some healthy tips for students to refer to. Here are some tips I came across from the article below:

Tips for preventing weight gain for freshmen
(and everyone else) from Dr. Gayle Timmerman

1. Establish an exercise routine and schedule it into your day. It’s even better if you can find a buddy to hold you accountable for showing up. Exercise is key to preventing weight gain, though it’s less helpful at losing weight once the pounds have added up.
2. Plan study snacks ahead of time. Studying is a high-risk time for students, so have a plan. Ask yourself the question, “What can I snack on that will have a small calorie impact and still get me through?”
3. When eating out, share a meal or box half the meal to take home. Large restaurant portions contribute to weight gain. Plan to eat half and offer the other half to a friend or box it up and get it out of your visual sight.
4. Try eating in your dorm room. Cereal, cereal bars, replacement meals like a Lean Cuisine and other foods that don’t require extensive preparation can mean the difference between a restaurant binge and a sensible diet.
5. Get your five fruits and vegetables. Skip the fried okra and French fries and pick up an apple in the cafeteria line.
6. Watch out for sodas and other sugar-filled drinks. Sodas, energy drinks and coffee drinks can put you on the fast track to weight gain. They add calories to the diet without easing hunger.
7. Monitor your weight. Timmerman suggests you weigh in once a week to catch any weight gain early. It’s a lot easier to deal with the weight when you’ve gained five pounds than when you’ve gained 15.

Freshmen 15

I remember at Frog Camp my freshmen year they made us go around and tell some of our greatest fears for the beginning of college. I still remember my response was "Freshmen 15." Majority of people have heard of the 15 pounds you gain when you get to college. But what is the cause of this, why does this happen to so many students? I weighed 127 pounds when I came to college, I now weigh around 124 pounds. If anything, I've been so afraid to gain weight that I've learned how to have a balanced diet and to work out a couple times a week. For many students however, they didn't have the advantage I had of growing up with health conscience parents so you see a lot of students gain a lot of weight. 

Fighting the Freshmen 15: In the article, Fighting the Freshmen 15 Dr. Gayle Timmerman at The University of Texas at Austin elaborates on the freshmen 15 and why this happpens. She talks about how students are going from portion control and home cooked meals, to having to do meals on their own and sometimes don't know what is too much. This is definitely the case at TCU. And with so little healthy food options, the freshman 15 is seen even more. If we had more healthy restaurants on campus, students wouldn't feel the pressure and anxiety of gaining weight in their college years.

If I Could Change One Thing About TCU...

We are starting to construct our websites and we've been brainstorming topics that we want to base our websites around. There are several controversial issues on TCU campus that you always hear students complaining about such as diversity and parking, but I wanted to choose a topic that wasn't a regurgitated topic. Since I was born and raised in California I grew up with a family that taught me all about eating healthy and how essential it is in life. My parents were by know means "granola eaters," but we definitely loved to eat organic. We'd grocery shop at Whole Foods or Trader Joes which are all organic food markets and would always try to eat healthy. When I decided to go to college in the state of Whataburger and fast food galore, I knew my eating happens would be changed drastically. My eating habits have definitely changed, not because I'm in college and "can only afford a cup of noddle for dinner," but because there are very few healthy options on or around TCU campus. There is one organic restaurant in all of Fort Worth called Spiral Diner and that is about 10 minutes away. The only organic grocery store is Central Market and that is a good 10 to 15 minute drive as well with traffic. The only food places around campus are Dutches Hamburgers, Red Cactus mexican food, Potbelly sandwiches, Einstein Bagels, and the Bluu cafeteria which usually is filled with pizza, hamburgers, and a mediocre salad bar. Sure we have Potbelly and Subway sandwich to get some healthy options, but you can only have a sandwich so many times. I've decided to develop a website based around the idea of implementing more healthier food options on and around TCU campus. I think this is a very essential issue that needs to be addressed and I want to show people at TCU why eating healthy is so important. I'm excited to create a website about something I'm passionate about. Now I just need to figure out the complications of Dreamweaver!

Outstanding vs. Lousy Webpages

We were asked to bring to class two outstanding and two lousy web pages.

An outstanding webpage that instantly came to mind was the webpage for Todd Events. Todd Events is an event planning company based out of Dallas that I was going to intern for this summer but ended up taking a paid one instead. They without a doubt have a very "glamorous" website though. I would say this is a 4th generation without a doubt. http://toddevents.com/. They bring some very realistic elements to the website, have music playing throughout, motion, and and simple yet elaborate design template.

Another outstanding webpage I thought of was one of my favorite restaurants of all time, Foreign Cinema. It is a restaurant in San Francisco that plays foreign movies on a wall while you eat your dinner and has an art gallery you can walk through while you're waiting. It is absolutely stunning, and their website just adds to the whole atmosphere of the entire restaurant: http://foreigncinema.com/home.html



Two lousy websites: 1. The Yale School of Art is WAY too busy and it design is all wrong. http://art.yale.edu/ 2. This is just an example of a bad website that we seem to run into too many times on the web and gives examples of what NOT to do: http://www.angelfire.com/super/badwebs/

Wait..there are different generation web pages?

In last class we had to present a 1st, 2nd, 3rd, or 4th generation website. Before this I had no idea there were even different classifications or generations for websites. It was very interesting to see all the different characteristics that each website entails. We had to present one of the websites in front of the class and I chose to present one of my favorite websites: thekollection.com. 

This is a music blog that has downloading features, large images, a neat and easy to use format, and not to mention great new music.