Previously, I wrote about why the certainty of student debt is a huge concern and limitation for a 17 year old A level student when deciding if university is the right choice.

Before now, when I was considering my options, I wouldn’t even have thought about paying for food: I mean, from 17 years of having three meals a day without question, to going to making these myself and finding the money to do so, is petrifying!

I also wrote, in my previous blog, that most of my peers would have no idea how to make a budget. Therefore, how are they going to prioritise their money to afford three meals a day plus social lives and academic materials?

So, as I do with most things, I researched it. I went onto the web and simply searched for ‘student recipes’ and thousands of results appeared, all giving cheap and cheerful meals that I could make for as little as £1 a portion.

Exciting!

I then visited various supermarket websites and found that:

• Own brands are much cheaper and;
• there’s nothing wrong with them

A carrot doesn’t have to look like a carrot, and a potato doesn’t have to be a perfect potato-ey shape! As long as I don’t starve, who cares? But some students would look at a deformed carrot and heart-shaped potatoes and cry a little inside.

A simple lesson learnt from my research was that I’m going to need to make sacrifices. So no salmon fillets or being fussy with branded orange juice! ASDA’s 65p orange juice will have to do, along with some alien carrots! No problem whatsoever.