WTF! Anyone else horrified at this Guardian article about "student" food?

[MrsTittleMouse]

www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/sep/21/student-cooking-recipes

It all costs an absolute fortune! My DH has a good job, but we don't have enough grocery budget to cook half this stuff. What are they all on?

I didn't do Uni, but my friend did, and she lived on one-pot stews which she started on a Monday and would bulk out with more veg as the week went on. She certainly couldn't affor most of that gubbins - I snorted at the pasta ish which explained it would serve more as a 'starter'.

From anecdotal evidence collated from her and my cousin, I would also suggest that the number of people a meal serves is a tad irrelevant. Do students band together to cook? My cousin had a housemate who would steal any and all food in the fridge. Saving portions for later would have been ludicrous. (mind you, this cousin is far too lazy to cook, so his desireable ginsters pasties, crisps and bottles of diet pepsi (all labelled, apparently) might have been a bit of a target.

That should have been hear hear btw

I am edukated - honest!

I lived on jacket tatties, tuna, scones made from refrigerated dough wrapped round a frankfurter, baked beans and air-popped popcorn.

And citrus fruit because it was cheap where I was living.

About the only times I indulged were when someone else was paying.

Who has dinner parties as a student? It's potluck and frozen pizzas all around. The major concern is the booze.

I know - dinner parties!!

The friends I lived with had a 'dinner party' every Christmas before term finished. That was the only one of the year. We each made a course and then got sloshed and abysmal red wine. God, we thought we were sophisticated.....because it was fancier than the veggie pakora in a bag that we usually bought on the way home from the pub/union!

I remember as an impoverished student getting an economy bag of pasta, cheap tins of tomatoes and a huge block of cheese. These then lasted all week.

I don't know, I have been costing meals recently and they are a lot more expensive than I expected.. e.g. slow roast beef -

beef - 2.50
tin toms - 66
basic veg - £1 (no markets round here, before you all say!)
pots - .50
a bit of booze - .70

So over a fiver for a very cheap, basic meal.
I would have been thinking closer to £4ish
for a meal of this type.

Chicken fillets are £5.99 for 10 though. 88p for a box of boil in the bag rice. Even the expensive luxury of tinned "Oriental veg" is only .75.

Having said that, I resent having to cost meals when both dh and I are professionals on a good wage. I want my creme fraiche and goat's cheese and butternut squash, goddamnit ((wails)))

presumably these recipes are for parents, so they think their children are not living on supernoodles and value lager.

being at a posh university there were no kitchens to speak of where i was, so i ate at the cafeteria, which was subsidised, plus a daily market in town so lots of fruit. did quite well really - i always wished they would bring back the British Restaurants of the late 40s so that i would never have to cook again - i guess the nearest we ever got to national communal canteens in this country. i'm sure the food was nearly inedible though.

"it seems to be a point of pride to see who can live the grottiest/most squalid as a student here - if you aren't living on value beans and sleeping with woodlice you aren't a proper student"

But that was half the fun of it! It was the shared experience of slumming it. I was in the cheapest halls on campus in my first year, it was self catering and the furthest walk from lectures. I'm sure there are more salubrious prison blocks. 5 students to a flat, and being that it was the cheapest hall most of us were on full grants (and most had been to comprehensives). There was a cameraderie in it, we used to laught at the posh public school kids in their cosseted catered halls . We spent most of our money on cigs and cheap wine, eating was kind of secondary to that. Oh, but we had to buy big bottles of pop so that we could use the empty bottles to make bongs

In the second year we went up in the world and moved to Balsall Heath, right next to where the red light district used to be. Some students chose to spend money on renting houses which were warm and had washing machines etc, we went for cheap as chips so we had more money left over for beer. Oh, and the obligatory Birmingham Balti. In fact there was one Balti house which would not only deliver your curry but also cheap booze and cigs. The original one stop shop.

Happy Days

I actually pity today's students more. There are so many 'essentials' (like dolly bird hairdos and outfits, cars, dishwashers (WTF) and laptops) that we managed perfectly well without, and that many students must be racking up thousands of pounds of debt to keep up with.

It was a competition to see who could live in the worst slum when I was a student, and it was fun. Genuinely fun. I remember in my third year digs the ceiling fell down in the toilet when someone pulled the light cord, leaving only the pull cord hanging from a rafter. We laughed our arses off (and probably had another drink).

I went to a RG in the late 90s and my parents bought a flat for me and gave me quite a generous allowance.

I still wouldn't have spent an hour and 22 quid making a 23 ingredient curry.

Cup of tea and a Marlboro Light for me!

Only read the OP.

WTF indeed! ROFL Surely a joke?

And I ate really well as a student, for about £44 a week (late 1980s) - cooking and shopping mainly shared between a house of 4 (so £11 each). It helped we could could (and maybe also that we could cook Asian food). We were living in luxury compared to friends on the dole.

As a poor-ish student in Durham (worked through all hols in Sainsbury's to pay off overdraft!) whose parents paid most basic level of maintenance only, I used to spend about £10 a week on food.

We ate brilliantly though - shared a house with 7 others and we had a rota for cooking - cooked tea in pairs for everyone else. Was great - most of the week no cooking/washing up - if you were late in from lectures (poor overworked engineers) or out doing sport then you'd find a plate of dinner ready to go in the microwave when you got in... we also baked cakes and stuff at the weekend, and once made apple crumble from apples from the tree in the garden. One of my housemates had a car and we used to take it in turns to go to Sainsbury's to do a big shop which we shared the cost of (had an agreed list of staples, any extras we paid for individually) and it all worked surprisingly well.

Think we may have been freaks, however... although we did all benefit massively from the cost savings (more money for booze...)

i went to a rg university, and was skint, and was from a skint family

our local kwik save was a godsend - loaf of bread, tins of beans, tins of soup, packet of cereal and splash out on a jar of marmite and you could eat for less than a tenner a week

i did get a job but that meant i could go out drinking without getting into massive debt

i also smoked

i had a full grant which did not cover rent/council tax, a student loan every year (which i have never had to pay back) and ran up two overdrafts as well as having a job

without the drinking and smoking i would have been fine financially but would have been bored rigid. i may have improved on my desmond however.

i'm ot that extravagent with food costs even now - my food budget is better than it was as a student but not by much.

and as for putting wine in food as a student - well the wine we bought was probably best used for cooking but it all got poured directly down our gullets

We didn't live in a slum (I've lived in much worse places since), but cooking facilities were very limited - a couple of boiling rings shared between 4/6 of us. That limits what you can cook. I remember us making lots of soups and so on. We did try to do 'dinner party' stuff every now and again, but I don't think we got into very sophisticated territory. I still think I cooked good stuff but it wasn't complicated.

I was a bit irritated, actually, that this was only a few years back but my cousin, who's planning to go to university next year, clearly thinks it was next-door to living in a hovel and cooking on an open fire. She just assumes there will be dishwashers and so on.

Obviously if they have access to a decent oven, grill, freezer, dishwasher, some of them are going to want to do something more ambitious. Cooking is as fun a way of procrastinating as anything else.

Took the words right out of my mouth, Tiger. The idea of students getting hold of 750ml of red wine (i.e. A BOTTLE) and using it to cook fruit in.

Ridiculous.

Apart from the cost, who could be bothered with those recipes? Making macaroni cheese into something that is "medium" difficulty and takes an hour? God, make something normal and use the spare time to snog some boys go to the library!

I used to make a vat of soup, or tomato pasta sauce (from scratch mind :)) and it would last all week, and only thrown out if it started to go a bit fizzy :o Wasn't hardship, just the kind of thing that lots of single people do, surely?

I knew one student with a car. This was regarded as highly eccentric and as a result of the money it cost him to run it he pretty much never went anywhere or did anything.

When I was at college the supermarkets were having a price war on baked beans and you could, at its height, buy a tin for 5p. I ate a lot of beans towards the end of term when money was running out...

I agree Provincial. I don't remember caring that much about clothes when I was a student, we usually just wore jeans and t-shirts with a fleece over the top if it was cold. Oh and sometimes long skirts with DMs underneath. But you only had half a wardrobe of clothes as you had to pack it all up and take it home on the train at the end of term. I used to get my hair cut when I went home in the holidays, most of the time it was tied back anyway. I did used to dye it strange colours though...

We didn't have laptops, we queued to use PCs in communal computer rooms. In fact, you could still get away with submitting handwritten essays anyway so you often didn't bother. Most people didn't have mobiles, you queued in draughty corridors to use the payphone.

Gotta love competitive slumming

Oh, but Elephants, I do remember the great joy of having a near-permanent bottle of white crap in the fridge, always referred to in front of anxious parents as 'the wine for cooking with'. Which we, obviously, did not cook with but drank.

Coming from a home where wine was only ever drunk with a roast dinner on Sunday, it was a genuine revelation.

Pound a pint, 5p beans... Happy, happy days!

"Put your griddle pan on a high heat".
"Use a pair of tongs"
"Flake the haddock into a mixing bowl"
"Put all the curry paste ingredients into a food processor or blender"
"Whisk the eggs in a large bowl for a minute or two"
"Ladle the fruit and sangria"

PMSL at the well kitted-out kitchen they apparently expect students to have! When I was a student we usually had a maximum of 2 plates in circulation at any one time, one manky cheap frying pan with the non-stick coming off, some forks, a few mugs, and that was Pretty Much It.

oooh yes a pound a pint

a pound coin was a beer token

i can't imagine going out and drinking four or five pints these days - my pelvic floor would not cope