Whether you are on a meal plan, cook for yourself, or order takeout every night, I’m sure there’s been a time when you wondered if you were getting the most bang for your buck. As a self-proclaimed sale-shopping enthusiast, hopefully I can share some helpful tips for eating meals that are both yummy and won’t break the bank.
While I haven’t been on the meal plan for quite some while, I definitely remember enough to share a few tips. One of my biggest issues my first year was getting food fatigued — basically I would get into a cycle of eating the same things everyday, and would just get so tired of them and not feel like eating much at all anymore. This was usually either chicken nuggets, pizza, or a cheeseburger for me since I was typically skeptical of any meat that came from the Comfort Station. To combat food fatigue, I would start to mix things up. For example, instead of always going to Pierce, grabbing a few meals a week from another campus dining location. And for whatever reason, I always seemed to forget about America’s Cup, which in my opinion, is severely underrated. During my first year, I also had a plan on how to use the GrubHub dining dollars of the meal plan which I was quite proud of. Since there were limited dining options on the weekends my first year, I would opt to use the dining dollars on weekends and get to try out some new fun meals.
If you’re not on the meal plan and instead cooking for yourself (this is the situation that I am and have been in for the past three years, wow I’m old), I also have some possibly useful tips for you! My biggest tip would be sitting down and just making a “master list” of all of the things that you like to eat, know how to cook, or can buy frozen. From there, you can pick and choose each week what you will cook and it can make putting together a shopping list really simple. I usually also like to rotate out which fruits and vegetables I am buying each week to have either as sides to meals or just for snacking. The planned variety helps me reduce food fatigue and maintain my motivation for cooking.
Depending on where you live in Hoboken, it can seem almost impossible to go grocery shopping since most of them are very far from campus. On a budget, I recommend going to ShopRite over Acme since it is much larger, has a nicer selection, and prices are consistently much lower. Typically what I do is grocery shop once a week, with two large Ikea bags each slung around one of my shoulders. While it is quite a trek, and definitely not an easy one, I am able to purchase a lot of food at a time even if I have to take frequent breaks on my walk home.
Now if you fall into the last category of living off takeout, I also have some useful tips for you as well. Utilize different offers and cash back incentives to make sure you are rarely paying full price for takeout! Along with this, make sure that you are logged into your Stevens account on GrubHub and are getting the free GrubHub+ membership with no delivery fees and also its own cash back bank! Other than perks on the GrubHub account, my favorite takeout hack is using my cash back rewards on my Discover credit card to purchase GrubHub gift cards at a discounted price. For example, with $190 in cash back (all just from my regular everyday purchases, not any money coming out of my pocket), I can purchase a $200 gift card to go towards takeout.
No matter how you get your meals, hopefully you were able to learn a thing or two about how I have gone through my Stevens career trying to make the most out of my dining, grocery shopping, and takeout experiences.
