Often
grocery shopping at the cafeteria is a little less legitimate than prole's description of actually
buying sustaining
junk food. For students who are REALLY without trust funds, grocery shopping at the
cafeteria occurs when the student or his/her parents have paid for a
meal plan that allows X all you can eat meals a week- call it seven. So every night the student eat dinner at an all-you-can-eat cafeteria. But if the student ever feels like eating breakfast or lunch, the student pays a-la-carte, requiring actual money or its equivalent.
College cafeterias often allow student to take home an apple, or a cookie, or one small piece of
dessert type
food. But the
wise, impoverished, grocery shopping
student will come to the cafeteria with a large
backpack, in which to take home enough food to eat until the next time he/she will be at the cafeteria, or food to eat over a
school break (e.g. Thanksgiving) when most students go home and the cafeterias close.
Because most food in a cafeteria is kept in open containers on countertops, the easiest items to steal are boxes of
cereal and bags of
hamburger buns. One can live a long time on handburger buns, especially if one has packets of mustard for them. If one brings
tupperware containers its usually possible to make out with actual prepared
pasta or vegetables or whatnot, though it really helps to have a refrigerator at home to keep this stuff in. In all things, its best to be wary of the dining hall staff- the chefs tend not to care, but their
supervisors do. The theiving student (can you tell its me?) will take the desired items, along with food to eat immediately, back to his/her table and surreptitiously slip items into his/her bag while eating.
mkb says re grocery shopping in the cafeteria: hohoho so true. at my school all meals are all you can eat, but the after hours place is expensive, so we swipe cookies and silverware all the time