The Diet of a College Student

Here in K1, we pride ourselves on the quality of our meals. We stand proud behind our beautifully displayed pasta bar. We rejoice in our massive exhibition of cupcakes and dipped cocoa spoons. We will ravish your taste buds with our calzones, spaghetti sauces, pizzas, meatballs, and Chinese Buffet Doughnuts. On any given evening, without occasion, we, unlike most college students, will whip up a full blown and incredibly delicious meal. It's a beautiful thing…
… most of the time.
Now, I guess it's not fair to implicate my roommates in this. It's mostly me. I'm really the one to blame here. Why? I'm not really sure. If I had to guess, I'd probably say it's because I either want to go all out, or I just quit. It's kind of like me with cleaning. If I can't do a full-blown spring-cleaning kind of deal, I will probably just ... not. You’d think I’d just get over it and make a quasi-real meal. No. I just go straight down the path of crazy. Here is a list of some of the bad food choices I've made this year:
5. Things Straight Out of the Can
Be it the pineapple tidbits I just finished, the cherry pie filling that left me full of sick, or the jellied cranberry sauce that’s on my list of “never purchase ever again,” I’m semi-notorious for eating stuff out of the can. Idk what’s wrong with it. It saves me from having to do dishes. But it’s not always (read: ever) meant to be eaten that way, so it tends to taste pretty shady. And yet I keep doing it … huh.
4. 7-Up … on Frosted Mini-Spooners

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One sunny Saturday morning, I woke up excited for breakfast. As I was about to pour myself bowl of Frosted Mini Spooners (remember, this was back at the beginning of fall semester when I was relishing every moment I had with cereal that didn’t taste like horse feed after a summer of Kashi and Chex. Woof.), I spotted a 2-liter of 7-Up sitting on the counter, and thought, in the middle of my morning intellectual fog, “Soda sweet. Cereal sweet. Sweet plus sweet equal very sweet. Good, yes?” Reason caught up with me for a moment, and said, “Are you serious?” A few seconds passed, and I was unsure of what I would do. Then I said to myself, “I’m in college. I DO WHAT I WANT.” Fortunately, I had enough foresight to only put seven or so Frosted Mini Spooners in my bowl, and only a quarter of a cup of soda in my bowl. Strangely enough, it tasted just like Fruit Loops at first. Then that 7-Up-y tang and carbonated fierceness that Sprite could never harness threw me into a tailspin. Rude.
3. My New Year’s Eve Feast: Ritz crackers, a chocolate Snack Pack pudding, a raspberry peach fruit juice, and peanut butter … I don’t even know what else.
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Being that I had just flown back home from Christmas break that day, and had spent like 14 hours travelling, it was perfectly acceptable that I didn’t want to go out and party on New Year’s Eve. I’ve never really cared much about the New Year, except how it destroys my erasers because I am constantly having to rewrite the date. I don’t make resolutions, because hey, who wants to be hugely disappointed in themselves come February (or January 5th, as the case may be …) when they realize that they’ve completely failed as a human being, and can’t even successfully give up carbonated beverages for a month (5 days …). Not like I’ve ever tried that, because I have a full-blown addiction to carbonated things, and I would never give them up because I see no reason to, as I have limited access to them.
So as I’m lying on the couch, I realize that I’ve got no groceries, but also that I don’t want to cook, and I’m capital-H Hungry. I’m too lazy to walk to the market (slash forget that it exists), and so I start scavenging the cabinets for things that are edible. What I find are Ritz crackers, a chocolate Snack Pack pudding, some raspberry peach flavor packets, and peanut butter. I might have found a few other things, but I know that those things were definitely there. I collect my items, ashamed of myself, and shut the blinds tight, lock and bolt the front door, fluff the cozy sack, and find pillows, blankets, and my cellphone, and plop down in front of the TV to watch Oceans 11.
But it doesn’t stop here. I know, it already seems bad enough that I’m spending New Year’s Eve alone in my apartment, eating these things, wrapped up in my little cocoon of loser-dom. Oh no. I had to get creative. I’m mixing up my peanut butter and pudding, I’m sloshing juice into my mouth before I can even swallow the cracker (which is, surprisingly enough, not that bad …).
I don’t really remember what else went down in my fit of insanity and sick hunger, but I am not proud. Not proud at all.
2. Straight Sea Salt

I’m one of those people that really likes salt. I like salty popcorn, salty caramel … all sorts of salty things. Now, our apartment has a spice rack, a really cute one, on which there is a bottle that holds (you guessed it) sea salt. And it’s the cool stuff that is in pretty sizeable chunks too. It’s great stuff.
So let’s set the stage for this a little bit. We’ve invited some of the gentlemen from #6 over to watch a movie and make homemade caramel, and we’re having a lovely time with them and a few other people that we didn’t really know. As Logan is stirring up the caramel, I’m chilling in the kitchen and I see this little jar of sea salt. So I start pouring tiny piles into my hand and eating the little pebbles of sea salt. Nbd, right? Well, as I'm going along, my throat kinda starts to burn, but it’s a cold, wet burn (yes, all three of those can be happening at the same time). It was weird, but I didn’t really think anything of it, and I kept eating the sea salt.
Suddenly, I realize that I’m going to barf. What do I do? I walk past everyone straight to the bathroom, kneel down in front of the toilet, and proceed to offer up my oblations to the porcelain god. Then Natalie came in and I was barfing and my face was covered in tears, because even if you’re not distressed, vomiting is one of those things that makes all the liquids in your face start coming out, whether you will it or not. That’s just reality.
1. Campells Chunky Baked Potato with Cheddar and Bacon Bits Soup … on Rice

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This was probably the worst possible thing I ever did. Let’s just clarify that shopping hungry isn’t only bad because you want to buy things you don’t need. It’s also bad because suddenly, things that should never, ever look good suddenly look delicious. It’s a good thing we’re not supposed to shop on Sunday, because if I went grocery shopping on Fast Sunday, I’d probably come home with a jar of pickled eggs or pigs’ feet or something. Granted, I was further deceived by the $1 price tag. A meal for $1? I’m on that like white on rice.
Which is funny, because rice is where things start getting really shady… Well, shadier than they already were.
So I make this soup, and realize that it’s not what it was pretending to be. The thing about canned soup is that it looks like there might be some variation in there, but they let it sit in the cans for like a billion years before they try to sell it to the public, and by that point everything has just decided to share flavors and textures, so it’s mostly just this homogenous slop that’s also probably carrying botulism. I realize this, and suddenly also realize, thanks to the stank … I mean steam rising out of the pot it was brewing in, that this soup is very dense with “flavor.” Knowing that my taste buds couldn’t take that kind of intensity, I knew that I had to find some way to stretch the flavor out and dilute it. I was afraid to put water in it, because that would make it grosser. Then I remembered that I had a Tupperware of rice in the fridge from some previous meal. I think to myself, “Soup on rice? It’s kind of like a sauce thing on rice, right?”
WRONG. It was like my mouth was Hiroshima and my own stupidity dropped a starch bomb on me, decimating all hope of happiness for the rest of the night. I was full within like 3 bites, the smell of the Cheese-Whiz-y cheddar “flavor” in the soup was giving me a headache, and I think they used hog tongues to make those bacon bits. So … awful … ughhhhh.