Yangming University Builds the Perfect Dorm Kitchen: Cooking a Meal Is Like Walking Out of the Deep Mountains

"They said cooking a meal felt like walking out of the school's deep mountains." Huang Guiying, Vice Dean of Student Affairs at Yangming University, recalls the enthusiastic response the first time she took students to cook, as she talks about the future dorm kitchen renovation plan she worked on together with students.

Cooking Is a Matter of Survival: No One Doesn't Want to Cook, They Just Have to Do It in Secret

Located in Beitou, Yangming University's campus nestles against Yangming Mountain, rising and falling with the terrain and divided from top to bottom into three levels: the administrative area near the flatland, the dormitories and student cafeteria halfway up the mountain, and the teaching area at the top. There are not many student cafeterias or convenience stores on campus, so students have limited dining options. With the arrival of delivery services, many students on campus also choose to order delivery to solve their meal problems.

"When a typhoon comes, cooking becomes a battle for survival for students." Huang Guiying explains that when natural disasters strike, delivery is unavailable, so students staying on campus buy food supplies in advance, and that is the peak period for dorm cooking. She believes it is no exaggeration when students describe cooking during typhoon days as a battle for survival, and there is demand during ordinary times as well, which is why setting up dorm cooking spaces is so important.

"Students don't not want to cook; they just need space." She says that when domestic universities built dormitories in the past, they did not consider that students might need to cook, and they even feared students would burn down the dorms by cooking. They assumed students could just eat out, so no dedicated cooking spaces were set up. But students with the need still cook in their dorms. For the management unit, underground dorm cooking is actually harder to manage and hides safety risks. She believes that since students have the need to cook for themselves, improvements should rightly be made.

The Newest Dorm Allows Cooking: Shared Paid Fridges Assigned by Lottery

Among the existing dorms on campus, the Fifth Dorm, completed in the 104th year of the Republic of China, has the newest equipment and is the only dorm where cooking is allowed. Every floor has a simple cooking space, and entering the cooking area requires card access. On odd-numbered floors, heating equipment such as ovens, electric cookers, toasters, and microwaves can be used; on even-numbered floors, microwaves can be used for cooking. None of the cooking spaces have trash cans.

"Not setting out trash cans is meant to help students develop the habit of cleaning up after themselves." Dorm counselor Xie Bozhou says this, and facing the dorm office is a transparent fridge, packed with a dazzling array of vegetables, drinks, and sauces. What is special is that each compartment is labeled with a different dorm room.

"This is a shared paid fridge." Xie Bozhou explains that each semester, dorm rooms are invited to register, and after a lottery draw, the rooms that win a spot can use one compartment, paying a usage fee of 150 yuan per month. The counselor says that because it is transparent and paid, students supervise each other and jointly keep the fridge clean, and a full cleanup is done at the end of the semester.

Shared fridge space is limited, so some students buy their own fridges and put them in their rooms, and they must cover the electricity costs themselves. Xie Bozhou says that currently both shared and private fridges can mostly meet students' needs, and the most ideal management situation would be to upgrade the shared fridge equipment to require card access, because he cannot watch the fridges 24 hours a day himself.

Learning to Buy Groceries in Order to Cook: Delivery Riders Get Lost but Still Deliver

"Secondhand fridges are very much in demand and hard to buy." Guo Yuxuan of Yangming University's Graduate Institute of Mind, Brain and Consciousness is a user of the paid fridge and also a Fifth Dorm officer. Originally from Kaohsiung, she began living in the Fifth Dorm last semester. She feels very lucky to have gotten into the Fifth Dorm: "Other dorms had someone start a fire while cooking in the past, so now they can't even use microwaves."

"I came north to Yangming to study, and after moving into the dorm I started cooking for myself. It was because I wanted to cook that I started going to the market to buy groceries." As Guo Yuxuan speaks, she pours the beaten egg yolk from her bowl into the pan and cooks it together with udon noodles and sauce, quickly finishing a steaming hot dinner. She cooks about once a month, and her signature dish is salmon fried rice.

Guo Yuxuan still mostly eats on campus. She has found that eating out near the school is generally more expensive, and if you want cheap food you have to go farther away. Most of her classmates also eat out. She laughs and says: "You see Foodpanda and Ubereat delivery riders on campus almost every day, and I often have to give them directions when they get lost."

Climbing from the 3rd Floor to the 7th Just to Boil an Egg: Cooking Saves Money, Lets You Eat More, and Is Very Relaxing

"Everyone in the dorm uses electric cookers the most. Once I wanted to boil an egg and found the cookers on the 3rd and 5th floors were both full, so I ended up climbing to the 7th floor to use one." Guo Yuxuan recalls with a laugh that everyone in the dorm has different cooking habits. She considers her own kitchen use to be average, while international students cook the most, and some classmates cook almost every day. Because the 7th floor has an oven, some people even bake cookies.

"Cooking is very relaxing, and it's also more economical. For the same cost you can eat more vegetables and meat." Her favorite vegetables are baby Chinese cabbage and wild rice stem. After buying groceries, she discovered that supermarket and market prices differ greatly, and she also realized she did not really understand how food is produced: "I used to think baby Chinese cabbage was very expensive, but after hearing how farmers grow it, I understood why."

"If I have time, I go to the farmers' market to buy groceries, but more often I buy nearby." Each time she buys groceries and cooks, it takes about two to three hours, which cuts into her study time. She still hopes to keep up the frequency of cooking, and in the future she is considering making the most of each cooking session by preparing a larger batch and storing it in the fridge.

The Last Mile of Food and Agriculture Education: The University Dorm Kitchen

Huang Guiying, Associate Professor at Yangming University's Graduate Institute of Visual Culture, offered courses and workshops on food and culture on campus two years ago. "At the time I hoped students would learn more about food and understand food culture." During midterms and finals, she took students to an off-campus culinary classroom to cook, and found that students were not as unable to tell one grain from another as she had imagined; some could cook a whole table of dishes.

Campus dietitian Cai Junhan visits the student cafeteria every day to observe the dishes, and students also regularly express their opinions: "They hope to reduce fried food, have more vegetables, and use less oil when cooking." Cai Junhan says that students on campus place considerable importance on diet and health. Bitter melon, eggplant, and green peppers, which are famous on the picky-eating rankings, appear almost every day, and they are quickly taken.

"The university dorm kitchen is the last mile of food and agriculture education, and also a place for socializing." Huang Guiying believes that cooking for oneself not only satisfies appetite and health needs but is also a place for students to interact and put food and agriculture concepts into practice. She says that many university students are living away from home for the first time, and if there is space to cook for themselves, they can establish good eating and life management habits. In addition, cooking meals by hand can relieve students' academic pressure and become a way for students to socialize and make friends.

Dorm Kitchen Renovation Workshop, with Students Participating Together

"Changing campus spaces seems to have been a natural result." After Huang Guiying took office as Vice Dean of Student Affairs last August, the school also hoped to improve student activity spaces. She took the opportunity to plan this and invited students to participate in the renovation, and the dorm kitchen was one part of it. She explains that there are many idle spaces in the existing campus dorms that can be inventoried and reused.

She designed the dorm kitchen renovation plan as a one-credit general education course and arranged the course time intensively as a weekend workshop. On the first day, professors from National Taiwan University, National Taiwan Normal University, and Chung Yuan Christian University, as well as the imam of a mosque, were invited to teach. That evening, students split into groups and went to each dorm to conduct site surveys, discussing and planning the dorm they wanted to renovate. On the second day, groups discussed the feasibility of the plans across groups and made revisions.

Through the participatory renovation by 25 students, more students can be inspired to care about and discuss the dorm