Author: Gaby Keane

Have you had your five? Perhaps you’ve seen the signs in on-campus eateries or have even been asked to actively participate in a pledge by filling out a card (while trying to enjoy a slice of pizza with a side of fries). Or maybe you’re wondering what the heck I’m talking about.

Cornell Dining has rolled out a new healthy eating campaign, “Have You Had Your 5 Today?” for the month of March. Its goal is to get Cornellians excited about eating “their 5” – five cups of fruits and vegetables, that is.

The “new and appealing dishes highlighting colorful produce” offered in eateries are part of the initiative, along with encouraging the campus community to eat five cups of fruits and vegetables a day. Each week of March, Cornell Dining is highlighting different colors of fruits or vegetables, with red the first week, orange and yellow the second, green the third, and blue and purple the fourth.

This is all fine and good, but what does a cup of some common fruits and vegetables even look like? Don’t use a lack of knowledge as an excuse to ignore this well-meaning attempt to create a healthier campus. Instead, use this helpful visual list of a cup-size serving (taken from MyPlate.gov charts) of a selection of fruits and vegetables. It uses an iPhone 5 for scale, so you can do the same when you’re picking out your five at the salad bar. For our non-Apple readers, an iPhone 5 is about 5 inches long.