[Editorial] A Healthy Bowl of Ramen for Hungry College Kids

A Healthy Bowl of Ramen for Hungry College Kids

As college students, we all have had the experience of bumping into our friends in the kitchen at night and hastily making up excuses for eating allegedly the most unhealthy yet popular college snack, ramen. Even though we joke and even brag about how much ramen we consume during finals, we still get embarrassed if we get caught eating them.

Sure, ramen are cheap, savory, and accessible but they prove that you are guilty of living an unhealthy lifestyle. The convenience and addictive flavor, however, makes it hard to walk away from them. Especially for busy, constantly hungry college students, ramen can turn into a quick and efficient, tasty, and comparatively healthy meal with a few adjustments in preparation and adjusting the ingredients.

Those skeptical of ramen’s appeal who fuss about its excessive amount of sodium can be found in every dorm. The noodles themselves, however, are not the source of the problem but the little spice packet that comes along with them. That problem can be easily solved by using only the half of the spice, replacing the rest with other spices in the supermarket or even in our dining halls, and the flavor would be the same since the seasonings have a strong taste.

Simply chopping in garlic or onions also does the trick, a method that a lot of Japanese restaurants use when making more authentic and sophisticated noodles. That would significantly lower the sodium level and preserve the savory taste without going through the hassle of having to search up countless names of foreign spices.

Even if we take out the sodium in the spice packet, the issue of MSG still remains. Some argue that MSG contained in the spices as a flavor enhancer, is the ultimate factor for the unhealthiness of ramen. Though the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) classified it as a safe food ingredient to be consumed and cooked, MSG has long been unfairly criticized for inducing headaches, nausea, and other negative reactions.

Such effects, however, are only shown to a very small group of people, much less than the number of people allergic to peanuts, and do not appear when consumed in moderation, just like many other food products. According to a study held by American Chemical Society, MSG and resembling chemicals are often found in protein-rich foods like meat, milk, and cheese and are even produced in our bodies when we metabolize food.

Although ramen itself does not have significant vitamins or minerals, it is easy to add vegetables and proteins to balance out the containing carbohydrates and fat. A packet of baby carrots that come with sandwiches or a handful of spinach in the salad section of school dining halls would be enough to compensate for the lack of minerals.

Slice in some leftover chicken or add a boiled egg and the protein problem would be surely fixed too. Adding chopped up beef or pork into the pot also helps while enhancing the overall taste of the soup with rich broth. These ingredients are easily accessible in nearby supermarkets or may be already stocked in the fridge since they are our food staples.

As easy as it is to cook, ramen fits into every occasion and fulfills various purposes for college students. Students who do not have enough money to eat out or pay for dining halls can buy it for less than a dollar from the campus bookstore. The spicy taste of ramen helps the students to destress over finals and endless pile of homework. Because it is simple and fun to cook, students can make ramen for study breaks or hold a midnight snack party in the kitchen.

Not only is it good for coping with studying on weekdays but it is also known to be a great hangover cure on weekends, which the majority of college students are equally in need of. In winter, instead of trudging through the snow to a nearby town bundled up in layers of clothing, we can stay in our rooms and pull out a packet of ramen from our bookshelves.

Ramen quickly and easily comforts the empty stomach of college students without draining their empty bank accounts. The additional vegetables and meat add taste, nutrients, and decorations to what would be a plain, salty pot of water, transforming it into a fancy cuisine. Next time when your friend catches you eating ramen, instead of acting like you are covering up a crime scene, you could surprise them with a warm dish of delicious, healthy ramen.

Danish Group Teaches Green Design

Danish Group Teaches Green Design

Students plan hypothetical Arboretum office

Many visitors of the Perlman Teaching Museum were confused when they first walked in at the beginning of this term. Instead of seeing a usual exhibit of photographs and drawings, they encountered a group of students and two artists in matching black outfits ardently working at a huge table that occupies nearly half of the Braucher gallery.

It is, in fact, not an exhibit but a studio art class called “Critical Studies in Public Space with N55” with visiting artists, N55. For the first five weeks, eighteen Carleton students will be working with Danish art and design collective N55 to come up with a proposal for a hypothetical building in Cowling Arboretum.

N55, consisting of Ion Sørvin, Till Wolfer, and Anne Romme, questions the definition of public areas and the ownership of communal spaces through their creations. Their previous works like the “Walking House” and “XYZ Spaceframe Vehicles” emphasize a nomadic and environmentally friendly lifestyle the firm strives to achieve.

Sørvin, the founder of N55, explained his fascination with the concept of land ownership. “We all take it for granted that we can own land, but if you look at it from a philosophical perspective, it doesn’t make sense that people can occupy land and prevent other people from using that land,” he said. “Eventually, if this situation persists, some people would not be able to walk on the surface of an earth.”

That is an idea that N55 is incorporating into their project, the building of an Arb office. The students and artists will investigate the functions of the Arb for not only the immediate Carleton community but also for local Northfield residents. They will examine the Arb as a contested territory that generates conflicting interests among various communities.

It is a project that weaves in different disciplines like sociology, history, and architecture. Therefore, it challenges the students to go beyond their areas of expertise. “It is different from how students here usually work, so they have to be more self-reliant and creative,” Wolfer, another member of N55, said. “Building an office requires rather more complex process than it seems.”

The students already held meetings with local citizens to discover their general opinions of the Arb, how often and for what purposes they use the area, and complaints they have about restrictions. Some students specializing in the history looked into the changes in Arb policies through the years.

While there is no concrete plan to build a new Arb office at this time, the artists hope they can contribute to the discussion on the plan that will likely occur in the future.

“There will be several ideas pointing in various directions that people can be inspired by,”  Sørvin elaborated. “We are doing something that will not necessarily happen but will raise discussions and show different aspects of these complex relations that people have with the land and how to share the land in a meaningful way.”

N55 was invited to campus under the auspices of the Lucas Lectureship in the Arts that sponsored Salmon Rushdie’s talk last school year. The lectureship rotates different disciplines in arts and this year, its focus is architecture.

One of the few Art History professors specializing in architecture on campus, Ross Elfline saw the opportunity and contacted the artists whose works he has been following for more than ten years.

“I didn’t like the model of bringing in one famous person for a day or two and then have them leave,” he said. “I wanted to bring a group of artists and actually have them work with students in a more engaged, longer term basis.”

Elfline first discovered N55 when writing his master’s thesis on blurring distinctions between fine art and design. He never had a chance to work with them before but was impressed with their working method, very different from the traditional American model.

“There is an end goal of building an Arb office, but the process of achieving that goal is more open-ended,” he explained. “In that sense, it is very different from other Carleton classes that have a constructed syllabus with every week rigorously planned out. It is much more flexible.”

Rob Reuland, a sophomore taking the class, commented on his appreciation of their teaching. “We don’t really have any architecture classes here, this is the only class that takes an idea and creates it in a physical mode, which gives you a lot of hands-on experiences”, he said. “I like how architecture is not just making a building, but it is also creating an environment.”

This article was published by The Carletonian (January 23, 2015) and on Carleton News https://apps.carleton.edu/news/features/?story_id=1237099