Campus Collection: Comfort and Culture
College provides a load of struggles for students, especially for those who may be starting out on the process of living alone and having to feed themselves. Being dropped into a new environment with little knowledge of their surroundings can be rough, and while most students who live on campus default to a meal plan for their first year or so, as they become more independent it’s a lot more relevant to understand what kinds of resources are in the area and what they can make of those resources. For Hamline specifically, students are usually told about the Target down the way (there’s even a whole event for first years based on going on a late night Target run at the beginning of the semester). While this is fine for basic shopping, it can get tricky when trying to branch off from what Target has to offer, especially when cooking on a budget, and even more so when trying to cook comfort foods- the latter of which can be a huge impact on students trying to adjust to campus life. I personally had this issue, and ended up very dependent on weekend trips home to eat my mother’s cooking and get away from the dining hall, and even after moving out of the dorms I shopped almost exclusively at Target, cooking the same, cheap meals of thrown together ingredients to make it through the week. I ended up wondering how many other students were in the same predicament and, more importantly, how they overcame it. This collection is thus a place for which to more easily share information on how to shop for and make comfort foods, with an emphasis on ease of cooking and with less expensive ingredients.