Off campus food is easy

There are a lot of things about college food that hold consistently true. 

    First of all, you can always be persuaded to have a late night meal at a sometimes sketchy restaurant if your friends succeed in convincing you that it'll be fun. Dining hall food can never measure up to a good, old-fashioned, home-cooked meal. A stomach full of ramen noodles or Easy Mac is better than an empty one.

   But despite being a college food truth, the most disturbing fact is that most people and corporations don't think that college students can cook to save their lives. This is especially true of those students living off-campus, myself being one of them.

   Don't believe me? Go look in your refrigerator and freezer, and count how many instant meals and frozen dinners there are. Or maybe it's one of those weeks where you're scraping together barely nutritious meals made up of spaghetti noodles and tomato paste.

   Or, as I find myself doing so often when I'm really craving it, wondering just how sick I would get if I eat the bacon in our fridge that's about a week past the expiration date.

At the risk of sounding like an infomercial or after-school special, I'm here to tell you that we can rise above that. Cooking doesn't have to be fancy or hard. It doesn't have to come from a box, bag, carton or can.

Food is easy. It's easy to mess up, but it's also really easy to get it right.

So I'll just make this my short introduction. As a fellow college student struggling to find the time to have a good meal, I'm going to try to help the student population of Marshall University get its culinary act together.

As a man who loves to eat and appreciates good food, I'll also search out local restaurants, both the nationally known and completely obscure, evaluating them for food quality and how "university-friendly" they are.

 I can't make you into a world-class, awe-inspiring chef, but hey, at least we won't fall victim to any microwave Easy Mac fires ever again.

   Eat well.

   Sean Webb can be contacted at webb195@marshall.edu.