As my time in the dorms last year drew to a close, my friends and I eagerly speculated about how nice it would be to live off-campus. There would be no meddlesome RAs and we wouldn’t have to share the same six toilets with 40 other people. Off-campus life, we decided, was the true college experience: complete independence without the school looking over our shoulders every five minutes to make sure we hadn’t died of alcohol poisoning. As this year dawned, we moved into our apartment expecting to live like kings: mature and independent with no need for supervision from University Housing.
Reality struck a few hours later, when my roommates and I got hungry. Last year when this happened, we’d go to Fire and Spice, Carson, Dux Bistro, or any of the other places where the University provided pseudo-free food for its freshmen. A lot of the fondest memories I have from my freshman year involve eating in one way or another; late-night drunks in Common Grounds, blistering my tongue on molten cheese from Carson calzones, eating dinner at 4:30 to avoid the line at Fire & Spice … When we were freshmen, eating was an event, a grand occasion occurring three, sometimes five times a day. It was usually the impetus for a flurry of phone calls and text messages attempting to wrangle more friends into the festivities. “Hey! Have you eaten yet? Do you want to eat again? Well, we’re eating now! Come watch us eat! We’re eating!”
But now we live off-campus, and the freely-available food honeymoon is over. Two weeks ago, my roommates and I collectively spent more than $600 on groceries and basic supplies for living: soy sauce, bread, Xbox 360 controllers, milk, and so on. Yet already we have to go shopping again, as we’re fresh out of yogurt and have reached the strategic reserves of our Eggo waffle supply. It’s been a shocking change to us sheltered middle-class suburbanites. We’ve always understood food in stores and restaurants costs money, and we’ve known from an early age if you don’t want to spend any money, you eat the food at home. However, this is the first time we’ve actually been in charge of the food at home, and only now do we realize things like peanut butter in the pantry and popsicles in the freezer do not just grow there. They too must be bought, only now it’s no longer Mom’s responsibility.
There’s so much planning to be done. It’s not just a matter of what you want for dinner tonight, it’s what you want tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. A chunk of a given day now has to be blocked out for shopping. The chore itself requires all sorts of speculation and planning. How much ramen is too much? My roommates eat Skippy but I am a Jif man, so what kind of peanut butter do we buy? What’s the ideal amount of pulp for our orange juice? And, once you’ve bought everything, there’s still the matter of actually preparing it when you’re hungry and not burning anything down in the process. In the dorms, eating was a party. Off campus, it’s practically homework.
The other night, desperate for food with nary a chicken pesto sandwich in sight, my roommates and I took a quick inventory of what food we had left in the house and did our best to meld together something resembling a complete meal. My roommates set to deciphering the instructions on the sides of our last two boxes of frozen pizza, while I brewed up a pot of rice. Half an hour later we were sitting down to a relatively nutritious dinner by college standards. There were plates and silverware too, and we actually ate at a table instead of just shoving food into our mouths over the counter. Once we were finished, we all did the dishes together and watched “88 Minutes,” which was without a doubt the worst part of the evening.
Maybe it doesn’t mean much to you that three adult males were capable of successfully feeding themselves, but it was an achievement for us. For three busy students to collaborate on the preparation of a meal and subsequently sit down and eat together is a heartwarming milestone in the vein of a Hallmark Channel Original Movie. It was something we’d never done before, and something we certainly wouldn’t have done had we been in the dorms with no kitchen and free prepared meals a single card swipe away.
So sure, maybe eating has become a homework assignment. But like any good homework assignment, we’ve learned something from it. In the end, I guess learning new things is what college is really about.
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