In the beginning, there was food.
At the start of the school year, as my roommates and I moved into our new apartment, we each brought along the fruits of a Kroger shopping trip. We marveled at our inability to fit everything into the pantry, and for weeks we lived in luxury - Kashi cereal, granola bars, hummus, even sliced bread. The fruit bowl on the kitchen table overfloweth, a mountain of fresh apples, peaches and bananas almost too pretty to disturb. But disturb it we did. Day by day, our supply dwindled, and we continued to make jokes about the time when we would be left with nothing but Ramen and peanut butter.
Flash forward two months and you have four girls, seated at the kitchen table, passing around a box of raisins. Lunch.
The pantry has been ransacked. All that's left is popcorn kernels and cans of pasta sauce. The refrigerator is even worse: tin foil-covered hummus with nothing to put it on, three eggs and a two-liter bottle of Dr. Pepper. And the worst part? Hanging on the fridge is our grocery list, the one we'll need if we ever get around to going shopping. It mocks us, both with what it says and what we know it will do to our bank accounts. Sure, we claim we're just too busy and too poor to go to the grocery store, but I think there may be something else to it. I think, deep down, the empty pantry thrills us, just as the overstocked one did back in August. It's almost fun to watch someone approach the fridge, open it, stare and sit dejectedly back down at the table. Our lack of food has certainly spawned many great First World Problems, and we laugh on empty stomachs, fully aware of our melodramatic complaints, "I'm starrrrrving."
Yet we haven't gone shopping. We talk about going shopping, we discuss how wonderful it will be to have something to put our spreadable cheese on, but we continue to fashion meals out of spoonfuls of peanut butter and the crumbs of a box of Life cereal. Why? Why not just end it all with one simple trip to Kroger? It's simple: We're college students, and we want to feel like college students, or at least the college students everyone talks about. The concept of the poor college student living in squalor is always in the back of our minds. How odd it would be to live in a clean apartment, to have a fully stocked refrigerator, to have any source of protein in our diets. We go to bed in four layers of clothing rather than turn the heat on. And yes we're saving money but that's only half the appeal. What it comes down to is that it's fun to feel like you're a part of this community which has existed for years and years - the community which eats off of paper towels and turns condiments into meals. And we not only want to be a part of that world, but also the community of our apartment itself. Just like the lack of air conditioning in first-year dorms gave us something to complain about and bond through, our lack of breakfast foods makes us sit at the table and stare at the fruit bowl, now full of plastic miniature pumpkins. But we're doing it together. And I think that's what keeps the pantry empty.
Sooner or later our kitchen will be restocked and we'll be back to Greek yogurt and fresh fruit. But in the mean time, we'll continue to stare at Crystal Light packets, marinara sauce and brown sugar as we think, "Mmm ... dinner."
Chelsea's column runs biweekly Wednesdays. She can be reached at c.spata@cavalierdaily.com.
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