How to prepare your child for university food – fully catered halls of residence – Food For Kids Podcast episode 96

Joanne Roach (00:14)

Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies.

Today is the first of a two-parter about how to prepare a child to feed themselves if they go to university or another post-18 route that requires living in dorms or shared accommodation. We're gonna be talking about two different versions of this, the catered route where you pay in your accommodation fees to include some or all of your food. And then the self catered route where some cooking facilities are provided and you make your own meals.

For these episodes, I am shamelessly exploiting my own two grown up children, Jacob and Anna, who both finished university in the last couple of years. So we're going to hear from them, but I'll also bring in some of the other issues that have come up for families I know whose children went to different institutions. Nevertheless, this is not an exhaustive guide and the main thing you'll take away from these episodes is to find out as much as you can about the realities of the individual place your child is going to, not just what the brochure says and to have realistic expectations based on what you find out.

When our kids were at sixth form and they were deciding whether uni was the right path for them or not, I started to think about what it might look like and how I might help them prepare. When I went nearly 30 years before them, hardly anyone we knew had been to university and it was all a bit sink or swim food wise, but the catered halls had OK food in decent portions and the student houses ran the gamut of okay to vile, but you still had your tuition for free and a grant if you were lucky. And so if you were prepared to live a bit frugally, you could manage OK. There weren't really many delivery options for food. Everyone was pretty skint but most people either didn't work or worked a few hours to get some extra money.

But I was aware that with the astronomical cost of going to university now, that if my children went, they were going to have to have significant jobs on the side. And so helping them to be able to eat decently for cheap and make the most of what free time they had was going to be important. So I tried my best to do what I could to prepare them for it.

On a non-cooking front, our kids had always done age-appropriate chores but we started trying to fill in the gaps a bit on some of them. Things like how to clean a shared toilet without having to touch it or how to defrost a freezer quickly because shared freezers always get iced up. They started completely doing their own laundry, including their bedding. We just did things like bathroom and kitchen towels. All of these things built up through sixth form just to have fewer overwhelming things at once when they left home.

And on the cooking front, I wanted to make sure that they'd have some confidence to cook a small range of foods really well so that they'd be able to live more cheaply and not have to rely on takeouts or ready meals all the time. Making sure they knew how to cook a lot of basics was something I'd always tried to do, but I knew that whatever route they took, they needed to be able to practice more whole meal cooking to have some confidence. So we tried doing more of that, getting them to plan and cook a meal for the whole family pretty regularly. And they both picked out some meals that they wanted to get the hang of because they like to eat them. And we made sure that they cooked those a bunch of times to get the technique down pat.

They wanted this too, so we were on the same page and it made life a bit easier, although they weren't always eager on the day to follow through, especially on a tired weekday after college when they just wanted to slob out. But they did both practice a few meals a few times each. And we also wrote down or photocopied or printed off those recipes so they'd have a kind of a recipe book to work from. And then because no one wanders around shared accommodation with a cookery folder, I used the scan facility in notes on my phone to turn them into a PDF so they could keep that in their phone with the recipes they wanted.

So far, so good, I thought. They'll be able to manage okay. And what they don't manage will be a shared thing to work through with their housemates or hallmates, just like it was for us.

But in retrospect, I was really rose-tinted thinking it would just be an updated version of what I went through back then. Not only do most students now have to do more part-time hours working and have less leisure time to cook and socialise, but the food environment just isn't the same now as it was then. The cost of living is super high right now and just like in society as a whole with lots of families facing food poverty, lots of students with high tuition fees and student loans are struggling to just afford food at all, much less think about good quality food.

Financial pressure on universities means that their catering is now mostly contracted out to profit-making companies on lots of campuses, with the reduction of portions and quality that you might expect in many of those places.

Students living in city centre accommodation suffer from the same thing that lots of inner city families face, that there are very few budget supermarkets or greengrocers in the centres and the only things available are the Express or Local supermarkets with a smaller range and often higher prices. Public transport is reduced from when I was at uni, so getting to and from a cheaper shop is harder if you don't want to fork out for an Uber or let your frozen food defrost on a long walk home.

In short, the issues that have made food poverty a reality for millions of families over the three decades since I went to uni are also affecting student food. These are all things I knew because of my other work with family food, but somehow I hadn't applied it to my idea of university life and it was as big a learning curve for me as it was for my kids.

So I wanted to do these two episodes to highlight some of the practicalities for eating at uni so that if you have kids leaving home in the next couple of years, you might be able to adjust your expectations, rejig some of your ideas and help them prepare in a way that is more realistic.

These episodes will run slightly longer than normal because there's quite a lot to cover, but I don't want to run across multiple episodes because I'm aware that a lot of people listening won't have children of the right age. So please bear with the slightly longer episodes for this one and the next one.

In this first episode, we have an interview with my son Jacob about his first year at uni, where he lived on campus in a university where everyone who was on campus is fully catered. When we looked at the brochure and went on the open days, it looked like a great setup, but for a bunch of reasons he found the reality of it pretty tricky, and we had to figure a lot of things out as we went. So let's hear from him about his experience of full board catered halls.

Joanne Roach (06:18)

So Jacob, you were in halls of residence on one of those big out of town campuses where everything's on campus and the food was included in the price of your accommodation. What did it include?

Jacob (06:29)

It was split by weekend and weekday. So on a weekday you would have breakfast and that was a set time and you had dinner that was at a set time and you had, across the week, £25 of lunch credits that were able to be used on the campus’s food halls. Which was supposed to be more than one, but for me happened to just be one.

Joanne Roach (06:53)

Why was there only one?

Jacob (06:54)

There was nothing else that was compatible with the way to buy stuff with your card, other than the main centre of the campus where all the food hall was. No one else accepted it, until I was in my third year when everywhere accepted it. So it was no use to me at that point, right?

Joanne Roach (07:10)

Okay.

Jacob (07:13)

And then on a weekend, you got a brunch at a set time of like 11 or 12 and then dinner.

Joanne Roach (07:20)

Okay, and so the breakfast and the dinners was in your own halls of residence in the canteen that was provided there, but the lunches were an allowance for anywhere that accepted it on campus. But you had to have those breakfasts and dinners, like in a hotel, the time period that it was open for.

Jacob (07:24)

Yes, so from memory it was on a weekday like 7 till 9 and dinner was 5 till 7 something like that on a weekday. And then on a weekend it was like 10 till 12 or something, And a similar time for dinner on the weekend as well.

Joanne Roach (07:51)

Okay, so presuming everybody was going to get up late on a weekend and wouldn't need breakfast, hence the brunch kind of thing. Yeah, okay. So what was good about the catering being included in your hall accommodation and what was bad about it for you?

Jacob (08.05)

One of the main good things is the fact that you didn't have to necessarily think about all your meals to plan, right? You could focus on getting used to the university environment And then I guess some of other benefits is that for me, the university I was at they only had Caters Halls on campus that a lot of the people that you would know were also catered. And so you could go and get food with them after a lecture or something. because most of the people you're with are catered, you know?

Joanne Roach (08:32)

So it gave you a bit of an element of being able to socialise with people that you didn't really know well enough to invite out for a meal, because you knew that you were all in the same boat.

Jacob (08:42)

Yeah, pretty much. And obviously it wasn't everybody. But it was a good enough chunk of people that you could kind of bank on it somewhat.

The main negatives were around that you quickly become sick of the options that are available, right? Like for me that wasn't as bad because I like eating the same thing over and over again. But for some of my friends they were like “I’ve eaten this seven weeks in a row now”. The fact was that most hot meals you could get with your £25 allowance for the week were over a fiver. So that if you wanted to buy a lunch five days a week of hot food, you'd be spending more than your allowance was and then you'd have no something left for the weekend in case you wanted to get something for breakfast for example, right? And so it didn't go far enough to actually cover all the meals.

And then the main thing for me was, because I was very sporty, I had things I wanted to do in my evenings that meant that I was training between five and eight o'clock, I wouldn't want to eat before training, training's at six, so I'd be walking there at 5.30. I'm not going to chowing down stuff in 10 minutes to train for two hours. But by the time I’m leaving the place at eight, I've got no food, right? And so, despite the fact that the food's available, it wasn't available to me. And because I did it at a high level, I couldn't be missing training sessions. It was something I had to attend really. And so I wasn't really given any option. And so I was having to work around that and spend more on food.

Joanne Roach (10:12)

So I can imagine for some people who aren't very good in the mornings, then the seven to nine in the morning was probably not going to suit them. But for you or for people who've got hobbies like theatre or so on, where there are set rehearsal times, the tea time slot isn't very good. And there wasn't any option to have like a meal deal left aside or a thing that you could pick up if you weren't able to be in the canteen at the set time.

Jacob (10:33)

Yeah, and just one thing I'd like to add with the meals is that they weren't very big either when you got them. The way they were advertised were you had unlimited sides to a meal.  And so when you buy it, technically you'd scan your card and you're buying it and it costs £7.90 a plate. Right, you could go and get the additional sides as much as you wanted, but the additional sides was just a salad bar with some sad looking lettuce on it. And so I was getting meals that were, if you're not exercising that much, of a reasonable size, but for somebody who was, before I went to university, eating like the high 2000 calories a day, I was not even approaching that with the size of the meals. I was probably eating like 2200 calories, maybe 1800 calories when I got all of the meals in the day, because they weren't particularly big and there was no opportunity to add onto them without significant expense. It was like a fiver to add something on and if you're doing that on every meal that's going to quickly rack up especially on a student budget you know?

Joanne Roach (11:39)

And I mean, like, yeah, you were sporty, but a lot of people of university age, and especially men of university age, are needing more.

Jacob (11:50)

No absolutely. I mean I lost weight when I was in my first year and I wasn't trying to.

Joanne Roach (11:54)

Right. No, clearly not with your training. OK, so what things did you end up doing to make sure that you got enough food?

Jacob (12:03)

Because the halls were catered, it was actually a weird situation because in normal halls, obviously you have access to cooking facilities. There wasn't that where I was. you had a microwave and that was it.

So for me to cover all my meals, I was having to buy ready meals that were like fridge ones because I only had a small fridge in my accommodation. There was no space for a freezer and the freezer section of the small fridge…

Joanne Roach (12:27)

It's an ice cream box, yeah

Jacob (12:29)

…was either poor or broken. Mine was broken. So there was no freezing anything anyway. And so I couldn't prep things ahead of time because there was no ability to keep it good for longer periods like freezing. And I had no prepping facilities to cook stuff even if I wanted to. So every week I had to buy bunch of bread, a bunch of nuts was the go-to because obviously calorie dense, good oils and protein, et cetera. I was buying ready meals. I had at least two to three in my room at a time because often I'd be training on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and when I'm doing that with lectures full-time, I can't even get back to the shops to get more when I need them so I had to buy them all at once and then fit them in the fridge.

Otherwise it was having to order food. I had a bike but the nearest places were in town which was a 25 minute cycle away and so unless paying delivery fee I was having to go an hour round trip to go and get food when the point is you've missed food because you've gone to training it's 8.30 you're tired you're not going to want to cycle for an hour to get food and so I was just having to order food. And so I tried to mitigate those costs of ordering food a bunch by getting ready meals but even then you know you're buying on a deal three for eight pounds three for ten pounds at a time and they're not good,  they're not even that substantial amount of calories they're like 600 right so it was just about trying to get as much of calorie dense food that wasn’t appalling nutritionally in as possible that could fit into small spaces.

Joanne Roach (14:07)

Yeah, into small spaces and only be cooked in a microwave or eaten raw.

So if there’s parents listen or students getting ready to go to uni in September and they're going to be in catered halls of some description, what advice would you give them either to the kids getting ready to go or to the parents helping them prepare?

Jacob (14:28)

The first thing I would check, is see cooking facilities are available already. it’s not that usual in catered halls and still only have a microwave, right? Normally you do have cooking facilities shared across a lot more people than you would in non catered halls, but you normally have some facilities to do it in. So first I'd check that because obviously that significantly expands your options that you would have. Let's say you are in the same situation as I was in, you have a microwave, it's not a lot you can do. See if there's space to fit something else in to store food. See if you can get a small fridge pat tested and in your room,

If you can't, it's about getting a routine where you can find time to get to the shops to get food. What is the meals that you can make? And so then you need to plan what you need to buy in ahead of time and when you're even available to do that.

Even more so, something to mention, on catered,  obviously don't choose what the food is for the day. If you're a particularly picky eater you might be having to do this even if you were able to make all the meals and so what meals don't you like on top of that? How are you going to mitigate that? And I think it's just about having a plan of when you can get to the shops and working out what calorie dense, long lasting foods you can get that you can fit into the space you have. I was quite lucky in that the dorm that I had was quite large, right I had plenty of space to store dried stuff and things like that whereas a lot of people don't even have enough space for their own stuff let alone store extra food. And so it’s what things you like eating that are going to just give you enough calories to get through and you're not going to feel great.

That is what it is. But what is the best thing for you to make sure eating enough, right?

My honest opinion is I wouldn't go catered halls unless the idea of cooking for yourself when you've just left home is really bad for you. You’re gonna have to do it in your second or third year anyway. So that would be my like actual first recommendation but if you are going down the catered route, it's kind of that triaging from there. How much autonomy do you still have? Are you picky at eating? How can you plan around that? What things do you like to eat?

Joanne Roach (16:38)

And as you said earlier, a lot of the benefit of catered halls is that you get to meet people. even if you are somebody who would rather cook for yourself, if you're in a university where everybody gets their friendship groups from being in halls, turning up to mealtimes and so on, then you may want to grit your teeth through the fact that the food isn't going to be that great. But then yeah, mitigate with things like, you know, packets of cereal and milk and your snack bars nuts, your trail mix, the sort of things that you did, some fruit, you can get some fruit at the weekend that will see you through with snacks as well.

Jacob (17:04)

Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the things I would say on delivery, something I learned from using the apps is that you will find that they'll give you promotions if you use the promotions when they give them to you, right? So if you see a good promotion, use it because they'll see it, you use it. And split that across the friends that you've met who live in catered halls, go “I've got this promotion it's 50 % off if I spend over 15 quid,  I fancy getting something now, anyone else want anything?” Four of you get meals, you pay one delivery fee and so it's reduced by a lot and then you've used your deal, you're more likely to get more and then maybe it comes back around when they have deals and so you end up saving money that way.

So it just reduces the cost on that when you need to as well.

Joanne Roach (17:50)

Okay, so work strategically with your friends to try and make the most of the times you do have to order in?

Jacob (17:58)

Yeah, pretty much.

Joanne Roach (18:03)

So as you can hear, the main thing that surprised and annoyed us was that we had paid quite a lot of money upfront for him to be fed 19 meals a week, but he was consistently hungry and having to top up his food intake himself.

I actually coincidentally went to the same university myself and I remember eating late night takeaways and snacks but that was more for social eating or comfort eating or let's be honest, after-beer eating, but not because I was replacing meals or making up for inadequate portions.

The set up with brunch on a weekend particularly irritated Jacob. It relied on the idea of all students wanting to lie in late and only wanting two meals a day at the weekend. And it didn't allow for anybody who had weekend jobs or who might just want an actual lunch.

As he said, there are lots of things to get used to with starting to live away from home. And so for many people having catered meals for the first year is a great option to stagger those responsibilities out. And to be fair, in many universities, it's either the only option in the first year or the only option if you want to integrate well into hall life and make friends in halls.

So finding out what you can in advance about the menus and the cooking facilities makes sense. In halls with partial catering, where only one or two meals are provided per day, you tend to have more cooking facilities, maybe a hob and an oven and usually a locker or a cupboard in the kitchen. But in fully catered halls, you are often storing all your food in your room.

In the second episode where we talk about self catering in shared kitchens, I'll talk about some of the things that you can and can't do in shared kitchens to make life easier.

To go back to the introduction and the idea of preparing your child for uni, Jacob did say one thing to me while we were recording that I hadn't thought about, which was that because he had catered halls in year one, the prep that we put in to learn a bunch of meals in sixth form actually made him feel worse in year two because he didn't get to practice any of those skills in his first year, but he felt like he should still know them. And so when he was rusty and got things wrong, when he started cooking for himself in year two, it was really discouraging. He said that it was still good, obviously, to have learned the skills and the recipes but that for him it would have made sense to have spent more time in the summer holidays between first and second year doing more cooking to refresh and rebuild his confidence right before he was going to actually use those skills. So that's a good tip to add in if your child's gonna be in full catered halls in year one.

Obviously Jacob's experience is just one experience of one university, although he did ask a few friends at other Unis for some of their perspectives before we spoke. So this stuff is not applicable to all catered halls of residence, but hopefully it will have flagged up some of the things that you may not have anticipated and you might be better prepared than we were. He was at pains to say that it wasn't all doom and gloom, he still enjoyed a lot about his first year, but it pays to be realistic that part of the university experience is to be eating probably crapper food than you want to eat.

During his first year, we did quite a lot of suggesting things that he could buy and store with no fridge, such as nuts, long store fruit like apples and satsumas, trail mix, cereal, individually packaged breads and brioches, shelf stable UHT milkshakes, fruit juices and smoothies, cereal bars and so on. 

Obviously we took what we could when we visited, but he had to be a bit strategic on shopping trips and either carry things home in a rucksack or sometimes share an Uber with friends for a cheap supermarket run so that he wasn't only reduced to the small amount of foods available in the corner shop that was walkable from campus.

But it's good to have realistic expectations and find out as much as you can so you can start to get that list of ideas for your child before they pack their bags and head off. So in the show notes, I'll link to a couple of articles listing ideas for dorm room snacks - with and without access to a fridge - so that your child can start to pick out and try out some ideas of things that might work for them before they go.

In the next episode, we'll be looking at the ups and downs of living in shared self catering accommodation and how to prepare for that. So I hope to see you then and in the meantime, happy eating.