Holla fo’ Yo’ Dolla

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p class=”p1″>It’s a day ending in “y,” so Cornellians are hungry. From trudging up Libe Slope with bookbags to prolonged periods of intense studying, life at Cornell can quickly drain you of every ounce of energy you may have. Away from home, you can no longer rely on Mom or Dad to prepare snacks or dinner; instead, you have to scour campus dining to curb your appetite. And more often than not, hunger seems to strike at the most inconvenient of times: when the dining halls are closed, when you’re far away from one, and when you have a class to make in a couple of minutes. This is when on-campus eateries come in handy. But anyone who has prematurely depleted their BRB balance (like me) knows that responsible food choices are key to staying full while not breaking bank. You may have a hankering for a salad, but will a bunch of lettuce really give you as much energy as you deserve for the amount you’re paying? Will you be hungry a couple hours after eating that salad?

In setting out to write this article, I hoped to identify the items at various campus eateries that provide the most nourishment for the least amount of money. To this end, my first instinct was to relate the prices of foods to their masses. The logic is simple: Foods with large masses tend to physically fill your stomach more than those with smaller masses. But there is one problem with using mass to measure fullness. You don’t have to be a food scientist to know that drinking 100 g of water is different from eating 100 g of peanuts. Thus, it is critical to analyze the nutritional composition of food to determine how full it will leave you.

As an engineer, I am pretty much clueless when it comes to making sense of different nutritional properties. But one thing I do know about is the Internet, and I used it to find a formula that computes the “Fullness Factor” of a given food — that is, how much given food will satiate you on a per-calorie basis. Multiplying the Fullness Factor index value by the total amount of calories in a given dish yields a relative measure of how full that dish will leave you. I will be using this metric to quantify the satiety of a given food. If you’re interested, I included the formula used to arrive at the Fullness Factor at the end of the article.

But measuring fullness is only half the story. If a filling item is exorbitantly priced, is it actually worth purchasing? To address this issue, I will be ascertaining how much a given food fills you up in comparison to its price by dividing the Fullness Factor by the cost of that item. This means that items with a higher ratio fill you up more for less money. I have also included the pure Fullness Factor rankings in case you want to purchase the most satisfying item irrespective of its cost.

Note: Nutritional information is provided by Cornell Dining. Not all items/vendors have nutritional information available. I have only included items that Cornell Dining has listed on its website.

Bus Stop Bagels

Cornell Dairy Bar

Goldie’s

Mattin’s

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