A few students gathered inside Centre Lodge, on Monday November 14, to learn about the Super Foods Sodexo has recently been offering. The ingredients for this course included: bananas, strawberries, skin milk, oatmeal, sweetener, cantaloupe, and pineapple. Participants received one bowl to mix their ingredients and recipe cards to follow. Along with these super foods comes the nutritional knowledge for college students to teach healthier lifestyles.
The upperclassmen on campus are starting to break away from the meal plan with high criticism towards Sodexo. In response, Sodexo offers seminars about nutrition addressing the criticisms with homemade smoothies. These new classes are the result of the new management changes in Sodexo’s nutrition department, one of them being Sara Patterson, a newer addition to the Sodexo team. Through careful planning and a little bit of flavor, Sodexo is pushing to change older student’s harsh opinions on the food here at Plymouth State University.
As this year’s new nutrition manager, Patterson guides students towards a healthier lifestyle in the form of smoothies in the second week of her cooking series. The series is meant not only to lower student’s blood pressure, but also raise awareness to the result of indulging in good foods and it can do for the human bodies. Issues such as obesity and diabetes were addressed while blending refreshing liquids made from real fruit.
“People are getting educated in nutrition because the general population isn’t educated on their eating habits,” said Derek Bolduc, one of the students that attended the event. Along with him were other amateur nutritionists Molly Morris and Lauren Oakes. Every student that was present at the course was eager to learn about what they eat.
Patterson believes that if you give students recipes to follow while teaching them their nutritional values, the more information is retained by students while cooking. In the Super Foods course, students were given a 20-slide PowerPoint on the food laid out for their smoothies. Sodexo wants to appeal more to the students of the University through the series, investing more into the interests of students.
Patterson’s four-week nutrition/cooking demo series is one of the first courses to offer class credit to students, properly named Cooking is Easy. Bolduc, Morris, and Oaks came for class credit for a nutrition and dietary class but it wasn’t the only reason why they participated in Super Foods. “Eventually, we’ll have our own kids to teach,” said Morris, while creating her fruit filled concoction.
Sodexo backs these newly developed programs in order to spread the values of nutrition to college students and more importantly, to make cut backs on the freshmen fifteen, as well as the budget. Students can find out more about Sodexo’s involvement by either visiting the kiosks in the dinning hall or checking out the website, http://www.balancemindbodysoul.com.