Most colleges across America have some kind of cafeteria-style dining hall where students swipe a card to get in, and are then free to take as much food as they like. As with any all you can eat restaurant, the goal here is never to simply get as much food as you need to be satisfied. The goal is to senselessly bring ruin upon yourself and the eating establishment by devouring a Honda Civic's weight in food.

When they said “all you can eat,” they were issuing you a challenge. If you don’t devour every bite that you can possibly stomach, nobody will ever respect you again. I know I certainly won’t. No mercy for any employee that gets in your way. Just think of it as a game: if the value of the food you consume is less than the amount you paid to get in, then the dining hall made a profit off you, and you’re a sucker. Don’t be a sucker. Shove food into your body until you hate yourself. That’s how you beat the system.

Have we all accepted the ridiculous premise of this article yet? Good, then let’s get started.

1. Sometimes, workers at dining halls will do this annoying thing where they ration the amount of particular foods they give you. For example, the other day, one of them had the gall to tell me that there was a limit of one grilled cheese per customer. I understand that they want to have enough of the good stuff to feed everyone, but I just want every last grilled cheese in the whole god damn building...and we can’t both get what we want. The obvious solution to this problem is to make friends give you their rations, but what about people who don’t have any friends? Don’t they have it hard enough as it is already? Well luckily for those losers, they can just get one helping, leave it on a table somewhere, then go back and get more until they have a whole table covered in grilled cheese sandwiches on individual plates. This means that there will be more dishes for the workers to clean...but if they would just give me all their sandwiches, we wouldn’t be having this issue, now would we? Also, if you’re friendly to the workers, they’re more likely to recognize you, and notice that you’ve come back for extra helpings twelve times in the past five minutes. So try not to be friendly to them.

2. Another way to get back at those grilled cheese misers is to take advantage of the self-serve items. These are nice, because you can get an unlimited supply of them without anyone bugging you about it, except maybe the person behind you in line when you grab the entire tray of sweet potato fries. The best thing about self-serve stuff is that you can get whatever weird proportions and combinations of things you want. Feel like putting soft serve ice cream on your waffles? Go for it, man. Want to go to the salad bar and get a whole bowl of bacon bits with no salad? This is America, isn’t it? Always dreamed of filling a cup with ranch dressing and drinking it through a straw? That’s disgusting. Shame on you. 

3. Most cafeterias will offer a ‘to-go’ option, where they give you a box to fill with food and take home with you (Or maybe they don’t. To be honest, I’m just basing all of this information off of my own school’s dining hall. I know about as much about other cafeterias as I do about Marxist ideology, which is to say not very much at all). Naturally, when filling a take out box, the object should be to test the physical limitations of how much food the box can possibly hold. Compact it by pressing it down with your shoe if you have to. If there is any hollow space left, fill it with mashed potatoes. What you should end up with is a dense block of foods all squished together into roughly the shape of their container. You’re never actually going to be able to eat this much food, nor should you ever want to. Save it for leftovers if you like, but you still won’t eat it. You’ll tell yourself that you will, but I promise you won’t. We both know it’s just going to sit in your fridge and get gross. However, that’s better than letting those bourgeois cafeteria workers have it all. They think they’re so slick just because they control the means of food production. Strike back my proletariat comrades, by taking all their mac n' cheese.

4. Incidentally, did you know that you can fit an entire pizza into one to-go box? (Two if you really shove ‘em in there). Theoretically, you could get enough to feed an entire group of friends for the price of one card swipe. Alternatively, you could eat the whole thing by yourself, then take a long look at your life and cry for a while. We’ve all been there! 

5. Also, if you do it really carefully, you can stack like 30 brownies on the lid of a to-go box, Jenga style. You’re going to look like a gluttonous moron when you try to carry it all home, but if you’re comfortable with people seeing you teeter down the sidewalk while balancing an unflattering tower of dessert on top of a box that already contains food, more power to you my friend. 

6. Along with the to-go box, you are provided with a fountain drink cup. The trick is that no one ever said you couldn’t fill your drink cup with more food...probably because they didn’t think they would ever have to. But someone’s gotta lower that bar, and that someone might as well be you. Trust me, you can fit enough quinoa in a large drink cup to make yourself miserable for weeks. 

7. Sneak in without paying. It’s pretty easy actually. 

So there you have it. Also, while you were reading this article just now, I went and cleared out everything decent from your local dining hall. Don’t bother checking, it’s all gone, dude. Go make ramen or something.