The following story is about a day in the life of a college kid.
You wake up at noon on a Saturday, the birds are chirping, your head is pounding and all you can think about is reaching for the Advil bottle that’s on your bedside table.
Once you’ve showered and look decent enough to show your face in public, you decide to bus it to the Indiana Memorial Union to get some homework done. Also, there’s Starbucks. Saturday isn’t complete without the ‘bucks.
Now it’s about 2 p.m. and you’re feeling pretty good about yourself. You haven’t had anything to eat yet, which is obviously helping you achieve a spring break bod. Once you get to Starbucks, you order a Caffe Mocha with whipped cream.
After “studying” on Facebook and BuzzFeed for a few hours, you decide to be social. All of your friends are going to Chipotle for dinner, so you avoid the fear of missing out by joining in on the fun.
At Chipotle, you order the usual — a healthy chicken bowl with brown rice, black beans, corn salsa, fajita veggies, cheese, guacamole and sour cream. Oh, and don’t forget the chips.
Aside from the annoying $1.80 that you had to pay extra for guacamole, you’re pretty content. The bowl was delicious and left you feeling full.
Now that it’s nighttime, you’re finally ready to rally once again.
Fast forward through a somewhat blurry night, and you’re back in your room. All you can think about is food.
You find some friends to chip in money for a Pizza X order. You get the Big X Bargain with pepperoni pizza, breadsticks, coke and ranch. Pizza X is essentially nothing without the ranch.
Two pieces of pizza and two breadsticks later, and you’re ready for bed. Clear eyes, full stomachs, can’t lose.
This story is fairly relatable to many a college student. We can’t deny ourselves of the greatest pleasure in life — food.
Recently, an article was published in The New York Times that startled many with the caloric count and daily sodium percentages of Chipotle food. Although those numbers might have scared the general public, at the Editorial Board we believe those numbers aren’t stopping anyone.
Let’s run though the above scenario again.
A Caffe Mocha with whipped cream at Starbucks is 400 calories.
The average chicken bowl sold at Chipotle is around 1,000 calories.
Oh, and the chips are 570 calories. Gotta love that salty goodness. Two slices of pepperoni pizza, two breadsticks, some ranch dipping sauce and a coke from Pizza X comes out to the grand total of 1,188 calories.
This is a mere two meals consumed in a day, and the caloric intake is over 3,000 calories.
That’s a big number, but the bottom line is that all of our bodies are different. There’s 40,000 students attending IU and not one body replicates that of another. Although we should be promoting healthy lifestyles, we shouldn’t care about or judge what others eat.
So upsettingly, Chipotle isn’t healthy, but as human beings we have the right to indulge in the finer things in life on occasion and in moderation.
We might go to a school that’s good at math, but when it comes to food, it’s alright if we don’t care about the numbers.
