Caitlin McRae
A bowl of cereal, skim milk and a bottle of water. That’s how Shelby Morgan started every day.
She found all of this at Trojan Dining, but also kept a stash in her room.
“I feel like it’s really important to stay healthy, not only in college but in life,” Morgan said. A human services major from Montgomery, she was a senior in the spring.
Morgan was a college athlete for a year before transferring to Troy, so she has the tendency to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Other students have their own strategies for eating healthy in college.
Cody Etheridge, a recent marketing graduate from Daphne, was an athlete in high school, but did not continue to play in college.
“I found it really easy to stay in shape using the on-campus gym, but it was kind of hard to eat healthy on campus,” he said.
The dining services do provide the students with some healthy options, but there is plenty of junk food in various food outlets.
“I felt good about sending my sons to Troy, knowing they would both have meal plans and always have an option to eat on campus,” said Daphne Holler, mother of two Troy University students from Birmingham.
“I don’t mind buying my sons a meal plan at all because they always use them, and I feel like they are being fed well.”
When you eat at Trojan Dining — the main dining hall — calories and facts about the food are posted above it.
Trojan Dining also has a salad bar, pizza and sandwiches. There are two restaurant options in the same building: Moe’s Southwest Grill and Boar’s Head, a deli. Both are open late and take the students’ flex points. Other food outlets are in the Trojan Center Food Court.
Campus dining is opened for breakfast, lunch and dinner. All students are required to have some type of meal plan.
Dorm life can be a challenge for students who don’t have access to full kitchens.
“My freshman year, it was really annoying because I wanted to cook my own meals but I had no access to a kitchen,” said Emily Armstrong, a marketing major from Birmingham who was a junior in the spring. “I began Googling things that you could cook in a toaster oven and a microwave, and I surprisingly found a lot.”
She began with small things like cookies.
“My favorite thing to make was pizzas,” Armstrong said. “It may sound weird, but they were delicious. I would make a bunch of mini-pizzas for all of my roommates and friends, and we would all have dinner together.”
Some concoctions weren’t exactly healthy, but they weren’t processed food. A toaster oven can cook items from salmon to bacon.
Off-campus grocery shopping options will increase when a Publix supermarket opens, scheduled for February 2017.
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