Week Two (5/23-29)

Memorial Day weekend was restful and gave me some time to explore the town. I hiked the 9.1-mile Big Lake trail, ran through a little woodsy area by the UNI campus with a 5k trail, looked over my rotation notes for the upcoming week, utilized the Panther Village fitness facility (a lot), watched a lot of Netflix, and got squared away to be a plasma donor. Yes, this is what a restful weekend in my life looks like.

Salad Shakers!

Tuesday was Test Kitchen day. I made some multi-grain layered salads in little to-go cups to see if they would be feasible for sale in some of the C-stores (convenience stores): you pour the dressing in, shake it up, and hey presto, portable and delicious lunch. The staff all agreed that the recipe called for a little too much stuff in each container because shaking them up was quite difficult. Our favorites were 1) a Mediterranean chickpea and black pearl grain mix with feta, cucumbers, and shredded carrots with a lemon-oil oregano dressing and 2) a Southwest mix with grain, black beans, red bell peppers, cilantro, and corn with a lime-oil cumin dressing. 

After testing, I helped out in the bakery cutting some spirited sugar cookies and measuring out flour, oil, and eggs for cakes that will be prepared tomorrow. I finished around 2:30, so I made my way home for some yoga, dance practice, and stationary biking.

Paws for Panther pride!

On Wednesday, I met with Lisa. She has an interesting position as the “Purchasing Manager/ Administrative Dietitian” for UNI. Although this seems like an odd pairing, it actually makes a lot of sense. She is intimately aware of all the food items in UNI’s inventory and the needs and desires of each kitchen on campus. Because of this, she knows what items are popular with students and with staff, respectively. This also means she has a greater understanding of different nutrition initiatives she can develop in a fiscally and technically responsible way. We talked a lot about how inventory is ordered through formal (bids) and informal purchasing processes. We went over some aspects of ethics in food purchasing, how the university makes local purchases, and how to write and accept bid orders with the help of the university purchasing legality team. We also discussed some nutrition-focused aspects of her job. She does sometimes counsel students regarding special diets or conditions (e.g.: if they are recovering from an eating disorder, they may be required to meet with her once a month and talk about their progress and setbacks). I also entered some new items into FoodPro along with their nutrition information. Don’t worry, all the ingredients in our new vanilla ice cream and whole-wheat white bagels are of the highest quality.

I’m currently working on a project to advertise UNI’s status as a Blue Zone Community. The Blue Zone Project began as a research initiative sponsored by National Geographic in 2004. They sent researchers out all over the world to find the towns or cities with the highest rates of people living past the age of 100. These people, centenarians, were concentrated in 5 cities: Loma Linda, California; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Okinawa, Japan; Ikaria, Greece; and Sardinia, Italy. Dan Buettner, one of the researchers hired to accomplish this task, used the information to author the well-known book The Blue Zones: 9 Lessons for Living Longer in which he explores the 9 key similarities between these communities believed to contribute to increased longevity. The book is more of an individual self-help item, so it was later expanded into the Blue Zones Project which provides resources to help other communities adopt healthy environmental, policy, and networking initiatives that promote health and long life. Cedar Falls is a Blue Zone Certified community, which means that it has met certain guidelines for health developed from this research. For more information, you can click here.

 It was another short workday, so I went home and worked on my projects a bit. I laid down for a quick nap around 8:30 pm, and lo and behold, I awoke at the merry hour of 7:30 am. Thank goodness Thursday was an off day! The three and a half hours of exercise on Tuesday apparently had a greater effect that I thought, but that didn’t stop me from doing an hour of both yoga and more biking! We had a Martin Brothers food show in the afternoon. I tried a lot of yummy food, mostly meats, grains, and sweets, but all were quite yummy.

I actually learned something very interesting talking to the UNI foodservice staff at the food show. When something expensive is being served on the line (e.g.: shrimp fettucini with marinara), the kitchen manager makes sure something popular and cheap (e.g.: mac and cheese with bread crumb topping) is served next to it. That way, people pick the popular option more than the expensive one. In addition, MIND. BLOWN. 

The rest of the day consisted of mailing letters, checking out the university bookstore (Panther pride collegiate merchandise, anyone?), signing up for summer access to the Wellness and Recreation Center (WRC), and working on my projects. I’ve been working on narrowing down my ideas for my special event. I’m really close to making a decision, but I still have a few more days to play around with ideas. I’m trying to decide between 1) Iowa products like beef, dairy, pork, oats, and corn, 2) breakfast for lunch with info on all the tables about how breakfast improves cognitive function, and 3) a picnic theme. I’m thinking I might even combine the Iowa product emphasis with another idea. It’s all food for thought (ha, see what I did there?)

Finally, Friday arrived!! I started the morning off with some yoga, per usual. Nothing gets me ready for the day better. Today, I helped open the Piazza with the student supervisors for the summer term. They are all lovely, competent people. I am quite excited to get to know them throughout the rest of my stay here. We spent a good bit of the morning playing icebreaker type games with some interesting results. For instance, not just one but two people are afraid of butterflies, our manager glued his eyes shut with construction-grade spray glue as a child, one girl just earned her black belt in Tae Kwon Do, and another is traveling to three different countries this summer. I spent most of the day working with Matt in the dish room. Granted, it’s not the “sexiest” job, but knowing how to run the dish machine and learning where all the kitchen supplies are stored is pretty important to running a successful food operation. He is a pretty cool guy: he is hoping to compete in his first bodybuilding show in November, he likes to mix music, and he has a potty-trained pet rabbit.

After work, I took a nap and then decided to go check out the WRC. I ended up making the endeavor a successful “back” day and rewarded myself with a PR challenge on my two favorite machines: hip adductor and abductor! I used to lift weights pretty regularly, but over the last 9 months, I've been really focusing on flexibility and dancing and rarely made it to the gym at all. Last August, my PR’s were 190 and 170 pounds, respectively. Even without lifting, I’ve made a ton of progress since then: my PR’s now are 250 and 210 pounds!

Maxing out the hip adductor machine!

There was a Cookies and Milk event in the PV living room at 6:30, so I stopped by to say hello and ended up hanging out with the guys until around 8:30. They are a ton of fun, so I am excited to get the chance to see them all again. Dinner at Applebee’s because I’ve been craving a Thai Shrimp Salad all week!