What did you eat when you were a student?

[Sunnytoday01]

I’m going back to the ‘80s but my diet was rubbish and I couldn’t cook. I used to eat a lot of toast and a hot meal would be Richmond sausages, smash potato and mushy peas or baked beans. My housemates and I would eat a cheese and tomato oven pizza occasionally. I even liked a pot noodle 🤣

I eat completely differently now but I can’t believe how awful my diet was and I didn’t seem to mind!

Lovely thread! I was at university in Aberystwyth 1987-90 and I’m pretty sure the supermarket was called Lo Cost. Anyway our diet was toast and marmite followed by Spira bars. There was a disgusting cheap drink called Barnetti or something similar. That was our pre Up Top Bop drink.
Plus meals of tuna mixed with Campbell’s condensed cream of mushroom soup, on pasta.

Looking back,very little!😂 I was always on some daft diet as I was convinced that at 5 ft 6 in and 9 stone,I was huge!

Early 90s
I was - still am - veggie
Pasta n sauce packets
Lentil spag Bol
Chips and sweet n sour sauce from the chip shop.
Sosmix
Instant custard and those boil in the tin steamed puddings. Pre microwaves!!
Cheese on toast (disgusting flatmate used to leave the grill full of bacon fat).

My housemates ate Fray Bentos pies a lot.

I'm sure I ate vegetables, but that is what I remember.!

I discovered cream cheese bagels at uni😄

Otherwise it was jacket potatoes, pizza, lasagna, cheese salad sandwiches, oh and large amounts of alcohol.

I’m pleased to say, I eat a more balanced diet these days and I don’t drink at all.

Genuinely can't remember! Someone got surprised at uni and said I had a ton of broccoli and vegetables on my plate. I loved noodles and going out for breakfast. Probably all sorts of things.

We ate pretty well! Prob lacking a bit in fruit/veg. We mostly cooked separately in our house due to different timetables etc. The men would have a giant meal like a big chicken curry then eat nachos or toast for a day or two. The women ate spaghetti Bol, pasta sauce and cheese with salad etc. I used to have spaghetti hoops on toast with cheese for lunch quite a bit.

Gin. And a recipe I made up: fry red pepper, mushrooms and broccoli with olive oil, garlic and chilli. When cooked stir in Philadelphia and pasta. Delicious!

And while I’m here, sardine curry. Fry a can of sardines in tomato sauce with a spoon of curry powder of desired strength. Finish with the juice of half a lemon. For some reason, I always had this in a baked sweet potato and it was DELICIOUS. There was a skint time I ate this three times a week and I swear my hair was like a golden retrievers in a Chum advert and I could open beer bottles with my fingernails.

I used to make a Big Pan Of Splosh - onions, mushrooms, peppers, courgettes, tinned tomatoes and some dried oregano. I would cook it for ages then have it on a jacket potato one night, rice another night and then on pasta. It had reached the end if its life-span when it grew fur. The rest of the time I lived on toast and cider, except for a three month period when I experimented with a black coffee, satsuma and vodka diet. Lost loads of weight, but spent a lot of time feeling a bit....odd.

I remembered something else. Cheese sauce that came in a tube like gravy granulas. I’d cook veg in a pan, then added that to make a sauce and mixed with pasta. It was rank, ate it all the time.

I recall getting through a lot of tinned pilchards, which were very cheap.

I think we once found a bag of frozen mini sausage rolls for 10p at Asda when at uni. They were absolutely delightful (not joking)! Aside from that I ate a decent amount of garbage, interspersed with home cooked meals which were largely bland and not great for me. Can't imagine how I got so many colds in freshers...

There was a pizza place that was £1.70 for two toppings so I had a lot of pizza.
Pasta, tinned ravioli, baked potatoes, cheese and crackers.
And a fair amount of ready meals and mountains of toast.

Beans with curry powder added. Beans with curry powder added to pasta. Beans with curry powder on toast.

I remember going to M&S for one of my first supermarket shops (I had good taste). I soon learnt not to do that!

Beans on toast.
Uncle Bens sweet and sour chicken.
bacon and courgette pasta with cheese.
sausage rolls

I used to shred cabbage, make kebabs, mint sauce and yogurt, in a pitta bread: lovely.
baked potatoes
soups
cheese on toast
stir fry Sharwoods noodles and veg
smoked mackerel pate
loads of pasta with veg

i was a decent cook actually and cooked for friends too

I pretty much lived on air and adrenaline when I was a student, which was daft as the college was fully catered and it cost a small fortune 🤷‍♀️ I could have had a full English breakfast, 2 course lunch and 3 course dinner every day. I was just rarely there at meal times because I was at my boyfriend’s, doing extra curricular activities or didn’t have time to go back for lunch between lectures.

In the 90s:
Pasta with various sauces.
Jacket potatoes and cheese / beans
Toast.
I can't really remember anything else. I don't think I bought much meat.

My ds1 is at uni and cooks more than I did - stir fries, curry, jerk chicken and rice, carbonara - although when he runs out of food I think he can do a week on sausage sandwiches and pasta pesto.

I lived on chips, crisps, full sugar coke, bacon rolls, fags and beer. Burger King on my lunch break at work. Not sure I drank a glass of water or ate some fruit the whole time. I’d have had veg when friends cooked. Dreadful. I’ve grown up to be a reasonably sensible eater who cooks from scratch and tries to be mindful about fibre and protein intake. And I don’t think I could drink a full can of coke now!

i’m hoping DS will eat better when it’s his turn…

I ended up with SCURVY in my 3rd year of university!
First year I lived in halls and ate in the refectory so all good
Second year we ate well as we lived in a house of 5 and would take it in turns to cook fairly decent well rounded meals
Third year I had to work so lived on potato waffles, Marlboro lights and sherry = scurvy.

Pretty normal meals tbh. It was 2013 so pizza, pasta with various sauces, prawn fried rice. Made most of it myself.

Whatever was cheap! My very cheapest lunch when skint was tomatoes on toast in one of the student union canteens - for 9d. (Obv. back in the Dark Ages of the 60s)
When marginally less skint than usual my treat to myself was a Vesta paella. Luxury!!

80a - spag Bol and chilli, jacket potaoes with beans, chips , curry so actually in hindsight ( ignoring the pot noodles) reasonably healthy and and not so far off today - I get more variation now and no pot noodles ( I grit my teeth )

One term DH lived on lentils and turmeric to save food money to spend on fun.

He stopped though when he turned yellow 🤦‍♀️