Today's Starving Students?
They’ve never had it so good !
By Aleck Mann
I remember we used to get sick a lot due the poor diet, and health insurance for students was not so easy to come by as a result. Nowadays, they throw it at these super low risk healthy learners.
When I was at college some 30 years back, we really were starving students and lived on a very meager budget. Even with a few students discounts here and there on certain products and services we still couldn’t save enough to eat well. Our diet consisted of a few tins of baked beans on the shelves and a little mini fridge in the college dorm room, which was packed full of instant noodles, cheap beer, and maybe a couple of slices of leftover pizza.
This diet is usually only altered slightly by upperclassmen living in apartments, either on or off campus. The upper-class starving student usually throws in the occasional dinner of spaghetti or instant mashed potatoes along with the ramen, beer, and pizza standards. Though the occasional student will venture into the realm of canned goods, these chefs are few and far between.
Fortunately, these days, the undergraduate’s diet doesn’t need to be quite so bleak, and with all the money saving deals for students it’s easier now than ever before to save the pennies and stock up on nutritional and wholesome foods.
You don’t have to be a world-class chef to make decent meals either. Usually all it takes is a “base” of some sort to your meals, and then you can dress up the base any way you’d like. For example, one of the most versatile and cheapest bases for meals is pasta. You can get a box of pasta in just about any shape you’d like for $1-$2, and you can do a lot to dress it up without a lot of additional time or money. Of course, canned spaghetti sauce is an old stand-by, but you can also fine jars of basil or sun-dried tomato pesto for nearly the same price. Or slice up some olives and throw in some tuna with lemon juice for a completely different meal.
Though the meal options for ‘some’ starving students are limited if they’re living in dorm rooms, many dorms offer the use of kitchen facilities somewhere in the building. If this is the case, make a big meal every few nights which will provide enough leftovers for lunch the next day. Think about ways for recipes to do double-duty; today’s spaghetti sauce can be tomorrow’s sloppy Joe mix.
If you’re living in a house or an apartment with other students, consider having one roommate cook dinner every weekday and buying groceries together. Buying in bulk will make it cheaper for everyone, and since it isn’t much tougher to make a meal for four or five people than it is to make a meal for one person, everyone gets a full dinner every night without all the work of cooking every night.
Of course, you could always break down and get a job in order to eat well. There’s also a better chance of getting students credit cards if you show willing to work (whatever next!). The moving company "Starving Students" was started by a college undergraduate who was looking to pick up some money in his spare time, so he formed his business to assist starving students moving house, and is now a nationally-known company, which definitely puts food on its owner's table.
|
Starving Students, don’t make me laugh! They live the life of Reilly these days, well most of them anyway. They’ve never had it so good, what with the credit for students on tap, and the generous long tern student loans given to them on a plate by the banks, they can eat what they want when they want it. Students health and wellbeing has never been better!
