Twenty years ago, the Guardian writer arrived at a London university with an Ikea saucepan set, a six-pack of Pot Noodle, and a jar of pesto. The eating that followed — kebabs that tasted of fire, nachos at 3am, bagels from Brick Lane eaten on the N253 with salt beef falling into her hair — turned out to be more formative than anything on the syllabus. That is the real argument of this piece: student food is not incidental to education, it is the education. The essay moves in two registers. The first is memoir, and it earns its nostalgia. The details are specific enough to carry real weight: the 8p Sainsbury's Basics chicken noodles subsidising brunch, the grease stains on vintage dresses treated as medals, the invented fourth meal they named 'pstub' (post-pub) with its own Facebook page and ceremonial rules. The writer knows that what makes food writing work is specificity, and she delivers it. The second register is reportage. Alex Harvey of The Student Food Project provides the data that stops the piece from being purely a warm bath in personal memory: roughly 40% of surveyed UK students have gone to bed hungry or skipped meals due to cost. Fees three times higher, cost of living 80% more expensive. The generational contrast is not just cultural — it is economic, and the piece is honest about that without turning the whole thing into a think-piece about the cost-of-living crisis. The three student profiles are where the piece does its best observational work. Aaron, the computer science student with a blowtorch for crème brûlée, is genuinely delightful — a person who treats cooking as serious hobby rather than grudging maintenance. Archie, the English lit student living off Aldi pizza and beans on toast to fund Harry Styles tickets, gives the piece its most honest sentence: 'Two things can be true at once.' Hannah's profile was cut short in the source material, but the two complete profiles do enough to establish that the Gen Z wellness-eating stereotype is largely a myth of the financially comfortable. The cultural argument underneath all of this is that food is social infrastructure. The Chinatown dinners with the Hongkonger nextdoor neighbour, the group meals where everyone contributes a dish, Aaron comparing cooking for others to showing someone a film you love — these are not sentimental flourishes. They are the actual point. As Harvey notes, loneliness and isolation are rising problems in student life, and food retains its old power to pull people back into proximity with each other. Pesto pasta is still number one. Some anchors hold. The piece is not without its soft spots. The Hannah Austin profile is visibly truncated, which breaks the rhythm of the three-voices structure and leaves the piece feeling unfinished. And the central thesis — student food is formative — is stated more than it is argued; the memoir sections carry it, but the reportage sections occasionally drift toward feature-box territory. Still, the writing is warm without being cloying, the details are earned, and the structural insight is real: what you eat when you first cook for yourself is one of the most revealing things about who you are becoming.
