The studies comparing a typical school meal to recommended dietary allowances would be the best option for a research paper. In a research paper, one is usually looking for cold, hard facts, and an athlete and school cafeteria workers are not necessarily experts on nutrition.
“Puddle-wonderful” is a made up word, a syntax. Syntax means “the arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences in a language.” So the author is describing the mud as wonderful.
