“What’s for dinner?”

This question is asked frequently. Whether you plan on eating in or going out, dinner or supper or a midafternoon snack should never be disregarded as something that simply follows lunch.

Heck, if you’re anything like my family, you’ll be asking, “What’s for dinner?” as you eat lunch. Or, if you’re not asking it out loud, you’re at least contemplating the answer in your mind.

University is a great place to broaden your horizons. Unfortunately, a large majority of these horizons come solely on the intellectual side (Proust or Kant or Baudelaire, anyone? No?) as we grapple with philosophy and multivariable calculus, French art history and the human lymphatic system.

I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. On the contrary, we’re all paying way too much money to not leave our respective universities a little smarter, a little more knowledgeable (and, of course, a lot more broke).

Simultaneously, though, it seems like such a shame that our minds are fed with a never-ending pile of textbooks to read or complex algorithms to comprehend (seriously though. Never-ending.) while our stomachs and taste buds remain largely ignorant.

College meal plans aren’t helping this grievous situation. We are required to purchase them, most of the time, when you begin college as a freshman, and of course, it’s understandable. We are college freshman who, let’s face it, have no idea what we are doing with our lives or our future.

We really shouldn’t be trusted to sustain ourselves, then. Unless you’ve had previous experience with cooking. Or maybe just a kitchen, if you’ve been in one of those. Or even if you’ve made toast? (I met someone last semester who didn’t know how to make toast, true story.)

Add in all the other emotional baggage (Stress! New environments! Studying! Balancing studying with partying! All of which adds more, you guessed it, stress! Which you subsequently sleep off until the night before, wherein you don’t sleep at all) and yeah, a freshman meal plan makes sense.

But seriously, who doesn’t get a little sick of industrial-cooked food? I mean, humans are creatures of habit. We have the same classes each week, and we go to the same places to eat, simply because they are comfortable and familiar.

The food we eat, too, is comfortable and familiar. We choose the same four or five items out of the limited selection that are at least somewhat palatable, and we proceed to eat them over, and over, and over.

We get so sick and tired of eating these same, monotonous meals that we actually find ourselves craving really ridiculous things, like that oddball Korean sushi-like something your roommate’s mom made that one time, with Spam and apples. Or your mom’s Brussel sprouts.

Yeah. I knew I was homesick when I started craving the Brussel sprouts.

There is good news: freshman meal plans aren’t typically mandatory once you become an upperclassman. Unless you live in the middle of actual nowhere and there aren’t enough restaurants or grocery stores to feasibly sustain your nutritional necessities, which is truly unfortunate and why is there a university there, anyway?

And once you graduate from needing a meal plan, there are so many opportunities to (a) starve, because you don’t know how to make toast, (b) learn, for example, how to make toast, (c) miss the obvious comfort, monotony, and convenience of meal plan dining, and (d) experience life as more of a semi-adult than you did when you were eating on a meal plan.

You can eat out! And not worry about not eating your meals for the week! You can stay in! And burn those sweet potato fries because the oven always smells like that, I swear! You can buy ice cream and put it in your freezer because, guess what, when you don’t have a meal plan, you can buy ice cream and also buy a freezer to put it in!

Unless your apartment/dorm room/suite thing comes equipped with a freezer, which saves you an awful lot of trouble. (Just think of all the ice cream you can buy now that you don’t need to spend money on a freezer.)

So yeah. Meal plans are a great way to assimilate yourself into the world of university living. One where you’re not quite ready to be an adult, but also, your parents aren’t around to tell you that if you don’t eat your vegetables, bad things can happen south of the border.

Honestly, though? The best part of a meal plan is getting off the meal plan. It’s such a learning experience – you can teach yourself to make eggs! To make soup! To make grilled cheese toasties! To see that a great, wide world of culinary wonders exists outside the pale, whitewashed walls of your university dining hall.

When all else fails – buy yourself some chicken stock and make gravy .