Students: to eat better, explore your city!
Between budgetary, material and geographical constraints, it's not easy for students to eat healthily. What can be done to change this situation and adopt healthy habits? Here's a look back at a field survey of young people, local authorities and university players.
Karine Garcia, University of MontpellierAndréa Gourmelen, University of MontpellierAngélique RODHAIN, University of Montpellier and Josselin Masson, University of Montpellier
At the start of each academic year, many students move away from home to be closer to their university or school.
Although this move does not necessarily go hand in hand with financial autonomy, and is a gradual process, it does mean managing one's diet independently. The stakes are high, with a short-term impact on their academic performance and a longer-term impact on their health.
In an environment that encourages access to junk food, how do you manage to eat healthily as a student? Based on interviews with decohabitating students, local and CROUS professionals, and field observations in a student town, here are some answers.
Eating well when you're a student: a path strewn with pitfalls
Students have many constraints when it comes to eating well.
Financial problems continue to grow, leading some of them to cut back on food expenditure, or even resort to food aid.
There are also geographical and time constraints, both of which are linked. In the absence of an offer that meets their expectations and budget, students have to look for stores that are often far away. Journeys to the food store of their choice can be long (in terms of distance and time) and require complicated organization (carpooling, public transport). Access to efficient public transport is essential, especially for those without a car.
In addition, material constraints (small fridge, kitchen reduced to the bare minimum, lack of storage space) encourage students to limit fresh food purchases and increase the frequency of shopping. Finally, constraints are also cognitive. Some students say they lack the knowledge to distinguish a healthy product from one that is less so.
To limit these constraints, the ideal solution would be to have a supply of healthy products nearby. However, student neighborhoods often correspond to geographical areas where fast-food outlets and convenience stores without fruit and vegetables outnumber the healthy supply. These are known as " food quagmires".
Student neighborhoods: a food quagmire
Our study focused on the food offer located within a 15-minute walk of the homes of the students we interviewed. On the one hand, we surveyed and observed existing food outlets. Secondly, we interviewed students to assess their perceptions and eating habits.
Only university restaurants are perceived as offering balanced meals at affordable prices in their immediate surroundings. However, the queues that have grown longer since the introduction of the €1 meal for scholarship holders make access to them more difficult.
Out-of-home catering consists mainly of fast-food outlets (burgers, kebabs, pizzas, sandwich shops, tacos, etc.) or a few more traditional restaurants that don't suit students' budgets. What's more, few universities offer rooms where students can bring their own home-cooked meals. All these conditions lead them to turn to the unhealthy food offerings that are multiplying in their neighborhoods and around universities.
When it comes to shopping, students associate small stores with high prices. While in some cases their perceptions are largely well-founded, they can also be exaggerated. Observations confirm that healthy, affordable alternatives around campus are not easy to discover. Small stores and specialist shops such as butchers close to student residences are systematically avoided, or reserved for very occasional shopping. Big-ticket purchases are made on a weekly or monthly basis in more distant outlets (discounter or hypermarket).
The interviews revealed a lack of knowledge among students about short circuits and open-air markets. While they know the principles behind them, they haven't identified how to get there in practice, even though a number of them exist in the neighborhoods studied.
Also, students who want to eat healthily on their own need to make the effort and take the time to explore their neighborhoods.
There's only one way to eat well on your own: explore your city!
Our study identified four different student profiles based on two aspects: their interest in healthy eating (and the know-how and knowledge they have acquired in this area) and their interest in the city (and the knowledge they have developed of its organization, transport and offerings). Each profile is associated with a main food procurement strategy.
The strategies implemented are of course linked to other factors, the most important of which is the student's budget. In our survey, students who relied mainly on CROUS food aid and meals were primarily seeking to limit their expenditure. For most of them, this is because they are in a precarious situation. For others, it's a question of limiting food expenditure in order to indulge in other pleasures in an area that interests them more.
Parental distance is another important factor, since only students who return home regularly can benefit from parental provisioning. By bringing in the groceries and supplying the hermetically sealed tins for the week, parents certainly enable their offspring to eat properly, but in fact hinder their dietary autonomy.
So it's not easy for students who live away from home to access healthy food. Apart from recurrent family provisioning, they have to make efforts to acquire both knowledge and know-how related to food, and to the city of study.
What can be done to ensure that students eat better in their city of study?
Towns and cities that benefit from the presence of students on their territory now need to think and act to meet their needs. Diagnoses of the food offer in student neighborhoods would enable the data collected to be used to target actions to be carried out with food store managers, such as raising awareness of healthy eating, marketing training to improve their knowledge of the student target, and support to help them promote healthy choices (financial incentives, visual aids) among students.
Short circuits and open-air markets should also be the focus of communication to make them more visible to students. A day to welcome new students to the city could be organized to publicize "good ideas for healthy eating", with a financial incentive in the form of a discount or voucher.
We also need to study the trajectories of students in cities, to identify the main places they pass through (streetcar or bus stops, etc.) and set up nomadic sales outlets to make the purchase of fruit and vegetables, soups, fresh juices or salads more routine, instead of snacking. Beyond this, the overall attractiveness of student neighborhoods also needs to be rethought, so that food shopping can be done easily and with pleasure, as part of their daily commute.
[Already over 120,000 subscriptions to The Conversation newsletters. What about you? Subscribe today for a better understanding of the world's major issues].
Students are advised to explore their neighborhoods and cities as early as possible to identify healthy food options. City websites and apps will help them locate markets, organic grocery stores and local events related to healthy eating. The city's Instagram page should also be packed with information to help them familiarize themselves with the food on offer. The university's student life office, as well as associations concerned with the ecological transition, are also important resources to help them find out about support for adopting a healthy and affordable diet.
Finally, when some of them have become fully autonomous, they will be able to play an ambassadorial role, sharing their healthy eating tips with their peers. Finally, after a few months' training, they will have developed crucial skills such as budget management, decision-making, organizational skills and a dash of creativity.
Karine Garcia, Senior Lecturer in Management Sciences (Marketing), University of MontpellierAndréa Gourmelen, HDR Senior Lecturer in Management Sciences (Marketing), University of Montpellier; Angélique RODHAIN, Senior Lecturer - HDR in Management (Marketing), University of Montpellier and Josselin Masson, Senior Lecturer in Marketing, University of Montpellier
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.