<sight is a beautiful thing,” said Kieran Dooley. In 2004, while in college, Dooley decided it would be a good idea to eat only Ramen noodles for 30 days. At the end, his entire body was shutting down and he had lost 24 pounds. If he had continued, he probably would have contracted scurvy—the illness that only sailors in the 1700s got while they were away at sea and only ate barnacles, basically. But he couldn’t continue, and he died.
College students do not have that many real skills and don’t know what to eat, why and when. Just recently, I pulled out one LDC brownie and then another from the same coat pocket. They were sandier in texture, but tasted alright. I found an earring I had lost embedded in one, so I don’t regret anything. Maybe I’m forced-teaming (a strategy that predators use I learned about in eighth grade self-defense class), but what you guys consume isn’t fine dining either. Domino’s pizza, I maintain, has no real ingredients in it, but it looks convincingly enough like food for us. The Domino’s people know how easily we are hoodwinked by steaming circles.
I have a friend who’s on a diet now because he allegedly gained weight over the summer. He eats exclusively salami paninis doused in ketchup. “That’s not healthy!” I protested, to which he said, “It doesn’t have to be healthy. I’m not doing this for health. It’s not what you eat, it’s how much of it.”
A group of college students is like any pack of simple mammals: it will do certain things to survive and not much more that. Our standards for spicing up physiological demands are low. It may be from lack of resources, it may be because we busy with other things or it may be an aesthetic lifestyle choice. Whatever it is, there will come a time when we too will have hindsight.