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?

That is one of the funniest Guardian articles for a loooooong time! PMSL at cooking tomato pasta as a starter! I couldn't be arsed with some of those faffy recipes now, and I enjoy cooking!

I remember the lads in the flat next door to us kept a carton of milk on their windowsill for about 3 months "to see what would happen". It became their pet, and was called Albert.

IIRC someone poured some of it through the letterbox of the "Tory boys" (a group of lads in the flat downstairs who pinned NEW LABOUR NEW DANGER posters up everywhere) on the night of the 1997 election.

With hindsight they may have actually had a point. Also, I'm not sure that that particular recipe for milk would appear in a guardian student cookbook...

Chortle at Jamie - "This is the sort of thing I cook when I get home late. It's perfect for a busy student who wants a fresh, tasty meal."

Wouldn't Jamie's Feed your Family for a Fiver have been much more appropriate? Not least because he seemed to aiming at a family of ginormous proportions.

But, now I've stopped laughing, it's quite depressing. It's all indicative of the yoof of today expecting so much more than we expected. Cars, laptops, mobiles (mind you, they weren't really around when I started college), designer togs, and now posh food. Even if students read that and think 'fuck that, I'm not cooking 22 ingredient recipes that take 2 hours', they'll still think it's OK to spend £11/head on a meal. Because Hugh Fearnley whatsit has said that's 'cheap'.

yes..well i lived in catered halls and topped up my grant by working FT in holidays...managed to bank my first loan. Got annoyed with contemporaries who didn't work in holidays, went abroad to have fun insted and then complained about their money situation....

judgey student pants :)

one night after a particularly rubbish college food we all made curry in the halls kitchen out of sweetcorn and bacon...yummy.

the worst accomms i herd of were in Exeter where my sister called from the phone which still worked miraculously after having been ripped from the wall.

Oh this is all amusing! I remember in Freshers Week having to share a flat with 3 other girls, one of whom 'got' me (I am still best mates 21 years on and was her bridesmaid!) and the other two who seems very far removed. They wanted to have a dinner party that week to 'break the ice' and got up at 8am (in our shared room....) to do Yoga.

Thankfully it was only for 5 nights.....

Riven, honestly, don't worry. This is my experience, and I was there 2003-7 so it can't have changed much.

• One person had a car, for all of one term. She was an 'honourable' (and a right twat too). I only knew 'of' her, btw - having a car was enough to make you well-known.

• No-one shopped at Waitrose!

• We did shop at the market, but because it was genuinely cheaper for some stuff (apples, basic veg).

• Everyone descended on Sainsburys at 9.45pm for when the food got marked down.

• We ate a lot of veg soup, scrambled eggs, and so on. But hall food was very cheap, and decent enough. It still is in most places, I've been back.

• If Gardies (kebab place) is still open, she'll eat a lot of that! Also terrible chips from the Van of Life and the Van of Death in Market Square.

Honestly, I think it's easier to eat cheaply in Cambridge than say, Leeds or York, where student kitchens are very good and the students feel they have to live up to them.

"beanfeast makes you fart"

I could eat it all the time at Uni with no side effects but it really, really does not agree with me now. I must have had a cast iron constitution as I could have a cup of black coffee and a fag for lunch, Beanfeast and pasta for dinner, several pints of Stella plus more fags in the evening and be pretty much OK the next day. If I tried that today, I'd be laid up for a week!

I think it's a result of the grant system going. We knew we had a set amount to live on and there wouldn't be anymore coming, unless we got a part-time job or something. Nowadays they're all just racking up debt - it's not money that visbly reduces as you spend IYSWIM - they can just increase their loan. Paying it off seems a long way away I should think.

Dh works at a university and he says there are now three Starbucks on campus Since when can students afford poncy overpriced coffee??? We used to eek out a 15p cup of tea and plate of chips in the local greasy spoon.

Would I change my experiences at university? Not at all. I had a ball!

at Merrylegs.

Same here (English Lit, but same deal). Who honestly thinks students are busy? They spend all their time pissed, hungover, trying to be pissed or hungover, or finding endlessly inventive ways to avoid doing any actual work.

A bit like runny cottage cheese. With an "interesting" aroma.

Know what you mean songbird. It's all such hard work for them tbh (and I mean that, it's not sarky). I'm retraining at the moment, and a student colleague of mine turned up at college one day looking absolutely beautiful (she's a lovely girl anyway, and also is 20, but that day she just looked amazing). I said 'wow you look great' and she said 'oh don't, I just haven't had time to do my fake tan, I didn't even straighten my hair this morning'. She was doing all that shit every day (week? I don't know how often you have to do fake tan). It must take her hours - and we have a course that has 25 timetabled hours a week. Leaving aside the fact that I thought she looked so much better without it. She does at least 10 paid hours a week as well, and if you don't have a laptop it makes life trickier as a lot of the work/information comes on the intranet. It's all such a rat race - not much time for thinking and talking.

She might not be able to, Riven - get her to check, we had to pay the kitchen subsidy whether we ate there or not, so it wasn't financially possible to self-cater more than the odd few meals.

But hopefully, they'll have changed that, or could make an exception for her given her eating disorder.

There is literally no point having a car in Cambridge. Proper adults with proper jobs don't seem to drive much, so why the hell a student would I do not know.

Ha ha ha

I graduated in 2008, Dh is in year 2.

I was always lucky as DH works and so we had a decent income.... but other students were going without emals at the end of term if their aprents couldn;t help (one in particular whose aprents were on separate hippy trails fiding themselves- and yes of course we all rallied around when we found out)

On DH's course the kids can;t even find work, classes are scheduled most days from 9 until 8 to 'maximise space usage targets', don;t hit your 80% attendance rate and they boot you out, and students from the past two year's graduation outlets are still in the aprt time jobs as they can't find anything else anyway.

£9.50 macaroni cheese? That's probably the budget for a week. The curry one is OK if you;re kitted out with spices (curry paste surely- students folkd, students!) and a huge pot of curry can fed a crowd for a while but.....

I really was laughing out loud, especially at the £22 fish curry. That's half my weekly food budget right now!

at Riven.

I always felt a deep sense of hatred towards cars when I was getting very wet and cold ... probably why I didn't go to lectures very much!

Freaking hell. Have they met students? Admittedly, there were people I was at uni with who would be able to have afforded (and would have eaten) some of these recipes, but generally, they had all attended public schools and probably had bigger food budgets for a day than I had for the year.

Otherwise, you could always tell when the term started because Tesco ran out of 9p tins of baked beans.
First year, I lived on

• toast
• pasta with spinach
• spinach with spinach (spinach was on special a lot at Tesco)
• orange cheese
• beanfeast, in many carnations, generally also involving toast or pasta. With cheese for some variety
• Scrambled eggs

I remember being genuinely concerned towards the end of first year when there were rumours running around about a student in Sweden who died of malnutrition after living on pasta for a year. I was comforted by the fact that my almost all toast and pasta diet was supplemented largely by beanfeast and spinach. In my later years, I was saved from starvation and abject poverty by working in a restaurant where I got free meals. I think actually 90% of my meals were from/at the restaurant.

I love my food so in comparison to my friends I spent alot more on my groceries but it still only came to about £15 in the mid nineties. I bought meat a couple of times a week but my fav dishes to cook were lentil soup (recipe not dissimilar to one in Hugh FW's river cottage book), veg chilli and numerous pasta/rice dishes.

Riven don't worry about your DD she will fit in fine. My brother recently graduated from Cambridge and he had great fun spending as little as possible. In fact he is now earning a lot of money but prefers to live in a hovel and squirrel all his money away to invest pay off his massive student debt. There are still loads of 'normal' students around who live hand to mouth in amongst the public school brigade.

I did a science based course and had a full day of lectures in the morning, 9 till 1, and afternoons, 2 till 5 were practicals - three hours and then you had to write up experiments.
After that we had an essay every two weeks and we had to look at and analyse about 50 slides a day, and draw them and write them up. We had obligatory field trips at the weekends - one every month with no financial support for those. I used to finish my labwork at about 10pm every day.

I had a scholarship of 500 quid a year, so had a job, and I worked every week of my summer holidays - I took a long weekend before term started.
I used to spend about 10 quid a week on food, and had no beer money. I also lived about 10 miles from campus (cheap, no central heating) and it took two hours commute there and back every day.

I am amazed at the number of students of in my town now who wear Uggs, and have phones and laptops. I feel they don't know they're born actually. I feel sorry for them too with their facebook lives - fake tan and hair straighteners. I wonder do they know where the library is?

I had a ball too and have such solid friends from uni. We all suffered in the trenches.

I always hire a science graduate if I'm looking for someone, as they know how to work.

'I always hire a science graduate if I'm looking for someone, as they know how to work.'