The Average Student Food Article

Welcome to your Average Student Food Article, which will teach you all you need to know about cooking at university!

Firstly, let’s adopt a tone of voice so patronising it would disarm even the most witless six-year-old. Aim somewhere between The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Captain Underpants, with a hint of ‘”cool” primary school teaching assistant who probably doesn’t have friends their own age’ thrown in for good measure.

Now, to business. Definitely put a line in at the start about leaving home for the first time and missing mum’s cooking. We all know mums are the best cooks, even when they boast smugly about not having used any salt in their food since 2003. Maybe even mention a Sunday roast here – the epitome of world cuisine which is obviously far too complicated to make at University. Lovely. Oh, nearly forgot: you’re legally obligated to use the word ‘daunting’ somewhere in that first paragraph.

Now, our job in this article is to tell these students not to worry their anxious little socks off about fending for themselves (do use that one if you like) for the first time. So, we’ve come up with a list of completely obvious points which, given that incoming students are bright enough to have worked their way around a UCAS application and probably hold down a summer job too, are a complete waste of our extremely limited commissioning budget. Mention that, with our top-tips, they don’t have to eat beans on toast for every meal – the silly gooses!

Ok, now we can dive right in and cut to the chase, getting straight to the point. Takeaways. Yeah. Takeaways aren’t just expensive: they soon add up. Do you think we should have a rhetorical question in here about whether students really know just how much money they’d save by cooking at home? Now make a really erudite point about saving money on food to spend on beer at the pub! With an exclamation mark to show you’re having a laugh, just like them!

This paragraph is where we put our serious hat on and explain how much healthier home-cooking is than getting a takeaway. Mention here that takeaways are high in fat and calories, because this isn’t always understood by freshers. This is also a great place to remind them about getting their 5 a day, and that buying vegetables rather than chips will benefit their physical and mental health in the long run.

Ok – this is going well. Here’s normally where we talk about some quick meal suggestions such as smoothies for breakfast, preferably using some sort of macho word like ‘boost’ or ‘power’ or ‘nutrients’ and definitely reiterating the true and undisputed fact that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. When it comes to lunch ideas, you can suggest making your own sandwiches rather than buying a meal deal because – actually – it’s both cheaper and healthier. For dinner options, make sure to label oily fish and vegetables as ‘brain food’.

Speaking of which, we need to talk about powering those late night study sessions. While it might be tempting to start the sentence with ‘while it might be tempting’, don’t be tempted by it. Tell them, straight up, that energy drinks are bad. Deploy the phrase ‘sugar crash’ to really make them sit up straight. Pre-modify your imperative clause with the adverb ‘instead’ to suggest fixing themselves a satisfying study snack of hummus and veggies* instead, and remind them that they can switch up the vegetables any time they like to make it more interesting. They’ll love all that. It’ll really teach them not to buy those huge cans of Monster and stay up til 4am trying to change Chat GPT’s sentence structure to pass off as their own.

Now, because we’re a useful article, we’ll write a brilliant batch cooking recipe at the end for our readers, which won’t be as thrifty as anyone actually thinks it is because most folk in the office do HelloFresh and get expensed lunches. Someone will suggest adding something cheap in, like tomato soup to replace tins of tomatoes, and everyone will think that’s a good idea because it feels very studenty.

Oh, and you mustn’t, under any circumstances forget to mention that cooking is about the most impressive thing a student can do to impress all of their fellow friend-flatmate-mates with their impressiveness. It’s traditional to suggest they invite all their friend-pal-mates around for dinner, just to impress them. Not because they like them, or anything, and want to make connections and spend time with them – but because the sole purpose of being a student cook is to make everyone cower in the majestic heat of their god-like culinary presence. Even if we’ve just assumed they can’t make pesto pasta.

STUDENT RECIPE:

Serves 6, at just 8p each. Takes 9 minutes; 12 if you’re drunk, you rascal, you.

Ingredients:

• Tin of tomato soup
• A Onion
• Vegetable (any vegetable you have is fine!)
• About 40g of pasta, because that’s enough and you definitely have weighing scales
• Tin of chickpeas (so cheap and chock-full of protein!)
• One level teaspoon of sumac
• 2 tbsps of rendered duck fat, for frying. If you don’t have duck fat, just use sunflower oil
• Plenty of black pepper, to serve

1. Chop the tin of soup into dice and open the onion.
2. Heat the frying pan in some duck fat and tip the onion and the soup together and fry until the voices disappear.
3. Peel the chickpeas and the sumac and add both of these to the pan
4. Cook the pasta directly in the kettle to save time and money.
5. Add the kettle pasta to the soup and boil for another 2 minutes
6. Serve covered in black pepper with the vegetable grated over to replace cheese, which is really expensive.

*it’s only hummus and crudités if the vegetables come from the crudité region of France. Otherwise it’s just sparkling carrot sticks.

This article is satirical. My new student cookbook is not. In fact, it is deadly serious and includes absolutely no jokes, references to second-cheapest Sainsbury’s wine or snorting tofu at the library. You should buy it for the student in your life who is probably going to be sent the above article in its various formats by well-meaning relatives until they actually end up at uni in September and can escape all the bollocks and burn their own sodding curry, thanks.