We've all had the uncomfortable situation of having a week and a half let in the semester and finding that we have a mere $3.12 left to our meal plan to stretch us for the remaining 10 days and four finals. Fortunately, this scenario can be avoided with intelligent spending. Here are a few tips and pointers to help you stretch those dining dollars out.
First of all, smuggle. Smuggling is not only the trendy thing to do, it can turn one admission to FFC into a couple of days of eating. My personal record from freshman year was 11 hamburgers, boosted from what is now the Fresh Food Café. Hamburgers and hotdogs really are the ideal items to take with you; they can be hidden in a variety of nooks and crannies on your person, and security certainly won't stop you on the way out (asking to see the meat hidden in your pants is a wonderful start to a sexual harrassment suit, so chances are you won't run into a lot of resistance during your exit).
Breakfast remains the most efficient meal at FFC. It costs the least, and calorie for calorie, it's probably the most you can eat in one sitting. Pancakes with syrup, bagels with cream cheese or peanut butter, sausage and eggs? You can hoover down 1500 calories there, especially if you wash it down with soda. The sugar coma will also help you sleep through your 9 a.m. lecture. Ah breakfast ... The gift that keeps on giving.
Additionally the cameras in the Charles Street Market are veritable scarecrows. While they may look like security devices, your $45,000 tuition doesn't cover the cost of real cameras. On a related note, a spacious winter jacket or trenchcoat is a wonderful investment for these cold winter months in Baltimore.
For the more morally inclined, you can always find a sugar daddy/oblivious friend whose J-Card you can use to buy enough Lean Cuisine to last until the apocalypse. I guarantee that there is at least one person on your floor who will have $300 left on their meal plan come Christmas. Find them and do what any self-respecting college student would do: Pretend to be their friend long enough to swindle them blind.
There is one surefire way to save your dining dollars. No, not anorexia. State school. With those extra $40,000 a year, you can buy enough ramen to feed all the countries the United States has invaded in the past decade. Without the highest-paid president in the nation and a staff replete with tenured bigshots, your state school surely has enough petty cash left over to muster up something better than the Blue Jay Café or Nolan's. Still, if you'd like to help out the dining halls, I'll leave you with the immortal words of Mathew Tully: Flush twice; it's a long way to the cafeteria.
