Missing my late-night coffees

up in a larger body still remembers moments like this, and although I am now 20 years old, I can still see their faces when I picture those memories. These kinds of things stick with you for a lifetime.

Starting college, I often asked myself, “Are you sure you should eat that?” This spiraled into excessive exercise, extreme restriction and poor body image. I destroyed my body by starving myself of self-care to feed the diet mentality I had religiously followed. While I didn’t want to admit I had an eating disorder, I knew that I was doing something wrong.

I started eating disorder treatment while home over winter break. At first, I resisted recovery. In a sick and twisted way, I had grown to love my eating disorder and everything it had given me. I viewed my anorexia as a method of control when it was actually taking every ounce of freedom away from me.

But like with any toxic relationship, the breakup is harrowing. Relearning how to perceive yourself takes time and a lot of practice. I had to learn the truth about diet culture.

Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, the creators of a flexible style of eating that follows hunger cues called intuitive eating, explain that dieting increases your risk for weight gain and increases the risk of eating disorders.

In fact, they say, “When the dieting mentality is engaged, your eating decisions are dictated by the diet rules … which can trigger feelings of deprivation.” These feelings of deprivation lead to binges and feelings of failure and, at the end of the day, make it challenging to lose weight, which is the goal of most people who begin dieting.

The truth is, the idea of “a healthy weight” is not supported by science. According to a UCLA study, 47% of Americans categorized as “overweight” according to their BMI were physically healthy. Despite what diet culture tells us about how much we should weigh and what our bodies should look like, this is not an indicator of how healthy you are.

The way diets label food as “good” or “bad” creates the perception in our minds that we can’t eat certain things, when in fact there is space for all types of nutrition. All that diet culture perpetuates is a damaging relationship with our bodies and the vilification of foods.

In order to live a life filled with joy and contentment with our bodies, we have to reject the diet mentality and uproot the vicious diet culture in our society. While I’m not yet recovered from my eating disorder, I know that I will do my best to never fall into a diet again — because when someone asks me, “Are you sure you should eat that?” my answer will be: “Hell yes.” herculcc@miamioh.edu

Deirdre Jost Guest Columnist

About once a week, I find myself thinking that if there’s anywhere a 24-hour Starbucks should exist, it’s a college campus.

I can’t be the only student out there who’s ever wanted a latte at 3 a.m. or a place that isn’t my apartment to pull an all-nighter. Despite that, though, it seems as though every coffee shop, restaurant, and campus building is closed by 8 p.m. Maybe it’s because Oxford is approximately 10,000 miles away from the closest civilization or because it’s too difficult to get staff that’ll accept low pay. Either way, about once a week, I find myself in desperate need of a late night snack or a 2 a.m. coffee, with nowhere to go.

Look, I understand that nobody wants to work a 10 p.m.-6 a.m. shift. But why, in a college town, does everything seem to shut down so early? Take Starbucks, for example: I’ve been to Starbucks locations that close at 9 p.m., 9:30 p.m. or even 10 p.m., but the off-campus location on High Street is closed by 8 p.m., as are the other three Starbucks locations in Oxford. I can’t be the only Miami student with a less-thanperfect sleep schedule, who wakes up late enough that dinner before 8 p.m. would be classified as lunch.

I’m not asking every restaurant in town to be open for 24 hours every day, but it certainly seems like there’s some missed profit in the late-night crowd.

The biggest culprit here is, of course, Miami University itself. I still fondly remember my freshman year, when King Library was open to study 24 hours, with fully stocked vending machines and a free-to-use microwave. Today, there are still vending machines, but the library closes at 1 a.m., and its beloved basement café even earlier, at 5 p.m.

Dining halls have a longer period of closure time, too. At first glance, they close at 8 p.m. — the same time they always have — but a closer examination of dining hall hours shows that dinner now starts at 5 p.m. It started at 4:30 p.m. last semester, and earlier in semesters before.

Even Armstrong closes its doors at midnight now, when it used to be at 2 a.m. my freshman year, and stops serving food even earlier. We were told years ago that the reduced hours were a temporary change during quarantine, but the temporary change has become all too permanent. For a college that wants its students doing anything but drinking, it sure doesn’t encourage any other activities on-campus late at night.

Maybe it’s still the lasting effects of COVID. Maybe people have just realized that it’s not worth paying the staff to stay later for the few late-nighters who will come in.

Either way, it’s certainly an inconvenience to me when midterms roll around and I find myself wanting a coffee and a table at 2 a.m.

Oxford has some amazing places to eat — but most of them aren’t open when I really need it.

Radwan Food Editor

In elementary school, like any kid, I always looked forward to getting home on Friday nights. Unlike the other kids, though, I wasn’t just excited for the weekend — I was excited for my dad to get home from work on Friday. You see, his office would supply Panera goodies — bagels, pastries and the like — for the entire department on Friday mornings. And if there were any left over at the end of the day, my dad would always wrap one specific treat in a brown paper napkin and transport it an hour home just for me: a chocolate chip Muffie. For those of you who have never had a Muffie, they’re literally just muffin tops, but they are SO good. My dad arriving home with one on Friday night always boded for a great Saturday morning for me, because I’d get to sit at the kitchen counter and eat it for breakfast.

After a while, though, I stopped eating Muffies. This was partially because my dad’s office stopped supplying them, but also partially because the way I liked to eat them wasn’t considered polite, proper or neat.

Most people just bite into a muffin, but I always liked to get my fingers in there. I’d rip the Muffies into tiny shreds, eating the fluffy golden bready parts while picking out each individual chocolate chip and setting them off to the side. Then, at the end, when the muffin part was all gone, I’d take the pile of chocolate chips, squish them into a lump, and eat them all at once.

In my defense, I was a kid — but why should I need a defense at all? It was fun, I was enjoying the food even more than I would have if I’d just been taking big bites, it kept me from being a pain underfoot and it wasn’t hurting anyone. If manners were the concern, why? I was eating in the comfort of my own home.

I’ve always been a bit of a strange eater. My bites are either tiny or gigantic. I prefer to rip bread products, such as sandwiches or Muffies, apart instead of biting straight into them.

Neat eating was not a concept in my vocabulary for pretty much all of childhood — my parents used to wonder aloud at the dinner table how I’d ever get a date if I ever ate like “that” in public, getting pasta sauce all over the table. To this day, I feel a rush of embarrassment every time my place setting is the messiest of everyone’s after a good meal.

And don’t get me wrong — I certainly understand the need for some manners. Chewing with your mouth closed, for instance? If it is literally affecting everyone around you, then all right, maybe you should try to be polite to your fellow diners. But then again, remember that your culture may be different from someone else’s. In some cultures, chewing with your mouth open or slurping your soup may be considered polite or complimentary to the chef.

Everyone eats differently. That’s the whole point of eating — it’s like life itself. If everyone lived life the exact same way, it would be pretty boring, wouldn’t it? And if everyone ate food the exact same way — or, god forbid, ate the same food — wouldn’t food lose most if not all of the joy it brings to millions and millions of people worldwide?

So let people eat the way they want, as long as it’s not hurting others. I don’t do it, personally, but let people eat pizza with a fork and knife if they want to.

Let me rip apart my grilled cheeses (crust first, of course, leaving the gooey inside for last). Let me eat the corners off of my chocolate squares before I tackle the middle. Let me pick the chocolate chips out of my muffins. This past weekend, I had a chocolate chip muffin for the first time in a very long time. In recent years, I’ve tended to avoid them to avoid wanting to eat them in my favored “impolite” manner. radwanat@miamioh.edu

This muffin was my only breakfast option, however, so I took it and I ate it and I enjoyed it.

I did rip it into small pieces instead of biting into it — I don’t know why, but biting into muffins still gives me the heebie-jeebies. But I managed to not pick out any of the chocolate chips, to at least avoid that, since I was in public.

At the end, though, there was one lone chocolate chip left in the wrapper when I finished. It had fallen out of its own accord. And as I picked it up and popped it into my mouth, met with the lone sweetness instead of the breadier, slightly more savory flavor that the actual muffin part of a muffin tends to bring, I was reminded of those Saturday mornings of my childhood.

Those Saturday mornings when picking out my chocolate chips was just a fun kid activity, and I didn’t have to worry about manners or being polite or what other people would think of me if I got chocolate all over my fingers.

In college, food can become a thing you need rather than a thing you want. I know I’ve had days when I make myself eat because I know I’ll forget otherwise. Where is the fun in eating nowadays? Where is our childlike enjoyment in our mealtimes?

So let’s bring the fun back into food again.