Why is it so hard for university students to cook for themselves? As soon as they use a fire, the school gets nervous.

When did you start cooking for yourself? For me, it was only after I left home to attend graduate school that I had the idea of cooking for myself. For one thing, I could not find the taste of home anywhere; for another, as someone prone to allergies, I stood beneath the signs of all kinds of restaurants and night market shops and yet found nothing I could eat. Still, cooking in a tiny dorm room is truly not easy. With no refrigerator, exhaust fan or electric rice cooker, just cooking a curry would leave the smell trapped in the room for three days. In an environment like that, it is really hard to maintain the habit of cooking for yourself. So what is the situation for university students now?

▲Figure 4: We opened up the office kitchen even more, letting students cook together in the "kitchen" and eat together at the "dining table" one day before they moved out of the dormitory; a little over 1 hour later, everyone brought out 8 creative dishes. (Photo: Shen Baoli)

The experience from these activities led us to suggest that universities can improve the difficulties students face in cooking for themselves from both software and hardware aspects:

Software aspects:

1. To respond to university students' need for green eating and cooking for themselves, universities should increase courses, teaching staff and information that expose students to green eating, so that students are well prepared before entering society;

2. Schools should require campus food vendors to add elements such as green, low-carbon eating and food waste reduction to their menus and dishes, better aligning with the goal of a low-carbon campus.

Hardware aspects:

Short term: accelerate improvements to the cooking and refrigeration equipment in university dormitory heating areas, so that students can cook in a safe and reassuring environment.

Medium term: renovate and open up existing campus spaces (such as unused classrooms, dormitory dining halls, dormitory common rooms, etc.) to create more spaces where students can cook and eat together; cooperation with groups near campus is also possible to inventory unused kitchens that can be used.

Long term: renovated or newly built university dormitories should add a separate kitchen on every floor, relax regulations that prohibit cooking in dormitories, and have the school take responsibility for the related management work, so that students can learn about food in a better environment and practice a low-carbon eating lifestyle.