Charlotte Tagupa lives in Brunswick.

Unknowingly, I chose a college with really good food, so good that I’ve spent every birthday dinner in the dining hall. When I do go out to a restaurant, I sometimes find myself looking down at my plate, wishing it had come from back on campus.

At first, this felt frivolous. There was a beautiful salad bar, well-cooked meats and creative
pasta dishes. Why would college students need food this good? Isn’t ramen noodles and peanut butter the spirit of college? My sister tells a story from her school, where she once ordered a BLT and got soggy bread and a lifeless tomato. The kitchen had forgotten both the lettuce and the bacon.

But good dining hall food does more than impress. It keeps students coming back and quietly shapes how they learn to eat.

Like many students, I arrived at college believing that health sits at the top of a steep mountain, that it requires discipline, calculation and daily effort. It’s a story the marketplace encourages, keeping consumers chasing the next product, plan or version of “wellness.” Step into a dining hall, and that story starts to fall apart.

There’s no packaging or labels packed with claims. No marketing nudging you toward one choice over another. Instead, there are simply meals: a carb, a protein, a fat and vegetables, prepared well, changing daily and available to everyone.

That simplicity matters. It shows that eating well doesn’t have to be optimized or negotiated; it can be routine.

Outside the dining hall, the story looks very different. In “Food Politics,” nutrition scholar Marion Nestle describes an “industrial food complex,” a system driven less by nourishment than by competition to sell more. That competition shapes not just what we buy, but how we think about food.

At the grocery store, packaging promises health if you choose one brand over another or swap a familiar product for a reformulated one. There is profit in confusion. And confusion has consequences. It steers people toward heavily processed foods marketed for convenience or “health,” and sustains a culture of quick fixes and unsustainable diets.

Navigating food becomes less about nourishment and more about resisting persuasion. Dining halls offer a rare alternative. Food is stripped of most of its marketing. Choices are shared and straightforward. Athletes and artists, freshmen and seniors, professors and staff all eat from the same options. Eating becomes less individual and transactional, and more communal.

Dining halls aren’t perfect, but they come closer than most places to removing the noise around food. Schools and colleges, designed to teach students how to move through the world, have a powerful opportunity to teach a foundational skill: how to eat well. That knowledge can save students money over time, on health care, fad diets and misleading products, while preserving one of life’s simplest pleasures.

Students aren’t immune to the pressures of food culture. But dining halls offer a starting point, a place where habits form in an environment that makes healthy choices feel normal rather than effortful.

That’s why investing in school food programs matters. Their value goes beyond nutrition metrics or calorie counts. They create spaces where people learn, through repetition and community, that eating well doesn’t have to be complicated. In a food culture built on confusion, investing in good food in schools should be simple.