At many colleges it's become common for students to get their meals by swiping their student ID. Generally, items are payed for a la carte or as a whole meal, if the student is on a college meal plan. Students can put as much money as they want on their cards, whether or not they are on a plan. Most schools with meal plans also have a deli or similar place on campus where can be had snack foods and beverages and other things that are not part of a normal meal.

Sometimes students without trustfunds, in an effort to ensure that they will, if nothing else, be able to eat until their next payday, dump all or most of their paychecks into these mealplans. Paying in cash offers more flexibility, but the mealcard means the money is safe from being frivilously spent in pursuit of entertainment, alcohol, or other. Why? Because once the money is in the account, you don't get it back until the end of the year.

For a student who practices this, especially a student inclined to stay up late coding and miss most of the regularly scheduled culinary programming due to class, work, or noding, the days between becoming broke and next payday are often very interesting ones. One subsists on pizza, salad, sandwiches, and bagels. One drinks coffee, pop, or snapple. And when one is at home, one eats nothng and drinks water because, lacking the funds to go to the grocery store, the cupboards are bare.

How to work around this? By stocking up at the deli. People might be inclined to look oddly at a student with his or her arms loaded with potato chips and ice cream and juice and donuts, but to hell with them. It's worth it to know that come midnight, when the rest of the campus (i.e., not the dorms) has tucked itself in for the night, one will not be deprived the luxury of snacking while one writes one's code.

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