Pass the harissa (or should that be vodka?)
As Waitrose comes up with the 2018 shopping list for Freshers, Esther Walker debates the real student essentials
What would Rick, Vyvyan, Neil and Mike say? Waitrose has come up with a list of frankly hilarious “storecupboard essentials” for the modern student just in time for Freshers’ Week, inducing cyder vinegar, rose harissa paste, tamari sauce, Italian seasoning and bouillon powder. The list comes to £13 without including a single carbohydrate or unit of alcohol.
Of course, it’s true that things have moved on since my time at university in the late Nineties, when living standards in student halls were only a little higher than camping. Our presence was vaguely tolerated by the vibrant silverfish community and my feet have never really recovered from the communal showers.
But the entire country has moved on since then, and students are no different. Social media, the animal welfare movement and generally higher expectations of food products and preparation mean that Mcdonald’s is no longer considered to be a peak dining experience and exam all-nighters are not fuelled exclusively by cheese toasties.
Once upon a time, having a horrible time in a condemned house eating dangerously badly was considered a rite of passage, but Generation Z wonder why they ought to put up with such nastiness and, you know, they’re possibly not completely wrong.
True Student – a chain of upmarket student accommodation – offers at their Glasgow campus a giant slide, indoor swings and a “festival area”, with a renovated camper van and deck chairs. What, no broken-down sofas that smell of fish and Big Calm by Morcheeba playing on a loop? They’re barely living.
Most important of all, today’s student will probably have a smartphone equipped with Deliveroo, so will they do any cooking at all? Kitchens will surely gradually be phased out of all student accommodation and become merely hipsteresque coffee stations serving rich banter like in Fresh Meat.
That’s the dream, of course, but what about when the student loan runs out for the term and Deliveroo is not an option? The young, inquiring mind will still need some food, which is where actually useful storecupboard essentials come in.
First, they will need plastic butter. That blended butter spread that tastes and behaves exactly like butter but isn’t and lasts for a year without going off. Spread on oatcakes – which come sealed in packets of six, so once opened the box will not immediately go stale – this is enough to see anyone through a morning of checking Instagram and moaning about politics.
Then they will need 1kg of wholemeal pasta – they will get used to the nutty taste and it might ward off the inevitable constipation from all those takeaways. For an emergency meal, add one of those small 200g cartons of passata (so a pint-size Dolmio jar of the stuff won’t then sit in the communal kitchen fridge and gradually turn blue).
The magic ingredient for students used to be tomato ketchup, which was added to everything and anything that required pepping up. Now it’s Sriracha, the tangy, spicy, garlicky edible pomade that makes everything taste like that takeaway you cannot afford.
Breakfast! A large Tupperware box of Cheerios need only be supplemented by a corner-shop pint of milk to provide a taste of home. I say breakfast but Cheerios can be eaten at any time of day, out of any number of containers. Let’s not forget that just dry, straight out of the box will do in a crisis.
While on the subject of milk, single-serve UHT milk pots will at least allow you to have a cup of tea while you plagiarise that essay off the internet, update your blog and worry that these are supposed to be the best days of your life and yet you’re actually not having a very nice time.
And who says it’s all about food? Remember sick building syndrome? This Nineties phenomenon was the beginning of the realisation that we can’t exist happily in vile surroundings like a giant windowless office or a tiny student room, where the windows are jammed shut and there is an unshiftable smell of soup.
If you have to make do with unmodernised halls of residence, it will require effort not to let the depressing surroundings cause you to drop out or get so drunk all the time that you don’t notice the mould.
To that end, the modern student will need a long, robust string of fairy lights to provide instant comfort and ambience in even the dankest of rooms. They will also need a door stop in order to illegally wedge open their fire door to aid both the ingress of oxygen and social interaction, which is very important when you contract tonsillitis in the spring term and there is a very real possibility that you will die alone in your room, unnoticed. Blu-tack holds most student accommodation together and there can never be enough. Poster sticker-upper, stress putty, prank facilitator – it’s a fresher’s essential. For hydration, two plastic highballs are necessary, as are two plastic wine glasses and a large bottle of vodka; the vodka will not only help you make friends, it can also be used as a basic but effective spot cream.
Another vital piece of kit is the overradiator drying rack – particularly essential if you have moved to an especially wet town, such as Bristol where it rains probably 95per cent of the time (or maybe it just feels that way).
Even if the accommodation is luxurious in other respects, the actual bedrooms are unlikely to be huge, so space-saving ideas are key. Luggage, for example, should never be anything other than those large, checked laundry bags.
Not only do they fold down to nothing, they can double up as actual, functioning laundry bags. This is for when you run out of pants in the second week and remember that, oh yeah, you are not at home and there is no magical laundry fairy, just like your mum is always saying.