I like to eat. I enjoy food. Eating is probably the only thing I do on a daily basis that is consistently pleasurable. And I’m not a picky eater in the slightest. When someone asks me what I would like to eat, my response is usually “Idk, anything except black licorice.”

Living off campus for the last two years has given me a great deal of independence with what I eat: what types of food I eat, how much I eat and when I eat. I usually go shopping roughly every two weeks and try to buy things that will last that time span and stretch me far enough to keep up a healthy diet while also being cost effective.

But because I live off campus and, some days, spend hours upon hours on campus without time to go back home for a meal, I am left either having to stock up on snacks and fill my backpack with enough Tupperwares full of pasta and chicken to get me through lunch and dinner or buy food from the various locations in campus buildings. The former usually isn’t very feasible with the amount of textbooks and assorted junk I have to carry around on my busy days, and since Wash. U. forces you to take a meal plan no matter your housing situation, I figure that I might as well spend some of those in these instances.

However, there’s a problem with this: The options available to students in most of these places aren’t very good. Specifically, finding truly healthy and filling options isn’t easy. With some small exceptions, the late-night meal options available to students on campus are either very unhealthy or just not good.

For those of us stuck on campus into the wee hours of the night (for example, those of us who have to create a newspaper every Wednesday), food options are limited. My options past 5 p.m. are to go down to the Danforth University Center food court for a greasy quesadilla, a greasy slice of bad pizza or a greasy pile of chicken fingers and fries. Now, I love half ’n’ halfs and would probably eat them every day if that wouldn’t absolutely drive my cholesterol through the roof. But when that is possibly the healthiest option I have available for dinner, there’s a problem.

And of course there is Subway, the king of subpar food. Easily the healthiest and most cost-effective option available at that time. Subway, whose bread is reminiscent of rubber and whose chicken barely qualifies as “meat,” is the best way to get a filling, semi-healthy dinner if you’re stuck on campus. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy Subway from time to time, but if I had to eat it every night, I would go insane.

I recognize that even late at night there is the option of the salad bar (which I don’t trust during flu season) and just getting the veggie side from the grill, but both those options kind of end up feeling like the Krusty Krab salad scene from Spongebob Squarepants. I shouldn’t have to resort to eating a side dish of roast veggies as a meal just because I don’t want a meal that’s been dunked in a vat of grease.

Now there is another option: pre-buying one of the packaged sandwiches or salads and saving it for later. However, I’m just gonna be blunt: These are gross. Soggy sandwiches and limp lettuce do not make a good meal. And this might just be petty, but I hate the stupid boxes that the packed salads come in. The dumb rectangular shape full of indents and ridges makes it so difficult to mix up the salads and get everything evenly coated with dressing. Nothing is worse than getting a forkful of bare leaves while the top of the salad is just drenched in dressing. Please Wash. U., bowl-shaped containers, please!

Rebecca Miller, if you’re reading, throw me a bone. I’m really only writing this because I know myself, and I know that I have very little self control over my eating habits. I’m the type of person who can eat an entire bag of Donettes in one sitting without even noticing just because I can’t stop myself. So if my only options are quesadillas or a half ‘n’ half, I’m going to get one of them and hate myself for it later. But if, say, there was also an option for maybe, like, a rotisserie chicken breast and some roasted potatoes right next to it, I would be more inclined to push myself to eat that. Please, Rebecca, if Costco can sell full rotisserie chickens for $5, why can’t we?