Fast Food Restaurants on Campus, Essay Example

College is the first adult experience for a significant proportion of students as they gain complete leverage over their lifestyle choices including dieting habits. In fact, one of the primary objectives of college is to teach students to make responsible life choices to increase the prospects of successful personal and professional lives and California Bay College (CBC) is no different. CBC has even greater responsibility as well as an opportunity to make positive impact on the students because a significant proportion of its students live on campus including all freshman and sophomore. CBC has attracted a great deal of interest from fast food restaurants to open on-campus opportunities and the college should use this as an opportunity to promote healthy dieting habits among students instead of resisting opening of new restaurants. One of the traits of effective academic institutions is that they do not primarily focus on preventing students from making mistakes but instead teach them to make responsible choices. Thus, CBC should allow more fast food restaurants on campus but may approach the issue in an innovative manner.

Preventing more fast food restaurants will not discourage students from continuing on with their unhealthy eating habits because students can always find plenty of options at existing restaurants. Similarly, merely making healthy food items will also not solve the problem because campus cafeteria already offers healthy food items but it has not been embraced on a wider scale. Thus, a strategy to inspire students to adopt healthy eating habits should be focused on understanding why they opt for fast food in place of healthy alternatives. It is important to have a reasonable understanding of the prevailing circumstances in order to devise an effective strategy.

First of all, all meal plans available to residential students are limited to cafeteria food only and even though cafeteria offers several healthy options such as salads and vegetarian choices, fast food available from on-campus restaurants is more popular than cafeteria food. Fast food may not only be popular due to better taste but also students’ lifestyle habits as it can be consumed on the run and is also frequently consumed by those engaging in activities such as video games, movies, and television. Not surprisingly, the combination of fast food and low engagement in physical activities has led to unhealthy weight trend on campus. Over 50 percent of students weight gain during their freshman year and this could have disastrous long term impact on their quality of lives because healthy and unhealthy eating habits developed during young age often remain with people throughout their lives.

The analysis of the above facts provides us several clues as to why the fast food may be popular and how the information can be used to design a strategy that may promote voluntary adoption of healthy food by the students. Fast food is popular because it may be tastier than the healthier alternatives at both the cafeteria and the on-campus restaurants. Some students are on limited budget and thus, may be attracted to fast food for economical reasons since healthier alternatives are often more expensive. Fast food may also be more popular because it is convenient and fits the lifestyle of the students.

One of the best courses of action CBC may pursue is to invite companies that want to open an on-campus restaurant and hold a competition among them to come up with affordable, tasty, and healthy food options. The offerings by these companies may then be subjected to blind-test among college students, mostly residential ones and those who come out at the top may be awarded the contracts. The blind-test will also ensure students are not influenced by brand-power in their judgment. This strategy may go a long way towards promoting healthy eating habits because the winning products will demonstrate to the students that healthy food doesn’t have to be boring or expensive. CBC will achieve two objectives by approaching the problem in a creative manner. First of all, greater number of restaurants means students will have more choices and their quality of life will improve. Second, more students will be inspired to adopt healthy eating habits and this may even motivate existing restaurants to focus more on healthy food items that are affordable, convenient, and delicious.