My name is Sara. I'm a second-year, soon-to-be third-year medical student. I like medicine, I like helping people, and I feel like medicine is my passion. I also enjoy walking, and I have two siblings. I actually grew up in Saudi Arabia for my whole life. At 18, I moved to America for college, and it was a nearby college, like Opportunity University. Now I live in a new city. My apartment is super overpriced. I am still deciding exactly what type of doctor I want to be. I'm thinking of GI, but it's one of those things, you know when you know, so once I start the third year and get through rotations, I'll find out what I want.I'll begin with a little bit of background. I kinda grew up in an ingredient household. It's a famous term on TikTok. It's a household that pretty much only has the bare minimum. Like, you can't just wake up in the middle of the night and eat a snack. It's an ingredient household; you only have ingredients to make something. When you wake up at 3:00 a.m. and want to make a snack, you're not gonna go and make a whole meal, so you just go back to sleep hungry. So that's, kind of, what it is. We’re middle class, but we didn't have a whole food pantry, so it was really the bare minimum for food. Then when I went to college, I didn't have an issue with food because, dining halls, that was really easy, and I was on scholarship, so never had an issue with that in college. 

I don't have time to make a whole meal or order stuff online, like groceries, so I just eat pizza every day or Panda Express. That's pretty much what I do during finals. I know it's not just me, a lot of students relate to this, but I feel like it makes it more painful, having to order it through Grubhub or UberEats, 'cause I have to pay so much and I have to pay the stupid delivery fees, and taxes, and whatever. A $10.00 meal basically becomes, like, $20.00 or $15.00 after all these taxes. I mean, I'm a medical student. I'm on loans pretty much, like, how everyone is. I have a really small scholarship from the school, but it's nothing significant, really. I take up a large amount of money in loans. It mostly pays for my tuition, which is a lot, especially since I'm out of state. My parents help me a little bit with the rent and food, but also my parents live in Saudi Arabia so the currency difference is insane. It's three or four times more expensive for them. But I might get loans next year to cover my food and rent.I'm not dissing this new city or anything, it's unfortunate, what the situation is, but it's such a bad food desert, that I have to pay twice in delivery fees, and the food comes cold. When I lived elsewhere, at least if I wanted to order something, I could just walk down the street and then, boom, I have it. But now I have to wait an hour. My food sometimes gets stolen, and I can't even feel bad because at least maybe someone who's homeless now can have some food. But now I'm also hungry for, like, an hour, and I have to wait another hour just to get food again.

There's pretty much only a Domino's and the small corner store that I just found out about, but I don't even think many people know about it. Our school only gives us free food, like, three times a year, which is, honestly, really unusual for me. At college, they used to give out free food at least once a week or twice a week. I don't want to flex, but I went to a really good undergrad, I went to an Ivy, so they always had free food, but it really did go a long way. Like, sometimes you just don't have the time or energy, you just want to go home and lay on TikTok and scroll for three hours. Like, you want to avoid going and making a meal. I miss that, but, at med school, I had to make everything myself. So cooking is both time-consuming, and it's physically consuming. Sometimes, it takes up too much of your time, and you fail to do anything. Like you cook a meal, it takes three hours, you're just really tired, you go to sleep, that's happened to me. There are times when I really can't afford to do that, so I just make some ramen noodles and I spend the rest of the night hungry. Just stupid, but, I guess I'm living in something that's worse than an ingredient household because I don't even have the ingredients. It's really hard. Sometimes I go to sleep hungry, which is shameful, but there's no food.

It really is annoying, and you can ask my friends and family, but if you ask them “What's Sara’s number one complaint?” it's always food, it's always I don't have food.  I don't have time to make food, I don't have money to buy food. It really does stress me out a lot. I think there should be a disorder in the DSM-5, called food insecurity or something because it really does stress me out. I get to a point where I really wish humans weren't created to eat food. Why can't we just be self-sufficient or something, why do we have to eat food? I know I'm being dramatic, but it really is a tough thing to deal with. I really wish I had something nearby, like a grocery store. I feel like that would make my life so much easier. I don't know what the solution is, but it's something that stresses me out every day. I'm not even kidding. There are some good days where I may have a recipe done, but most days, I don't know what to do. Should I sleep hungry, should I eat ramen noodles, should I break my wallet and buy something from Grubhub? So, it's tough.Food is one of those sneaky things that you think is easy to make, but it's really not, because the mental effort behind it is three times as big. The time it takes to come up with a recipe, three or four dishes per week, that have to be diverse and have to be healthy and nutritious, and ordering it, and making sure that you have enough money, like, your EBT card is enough to suffice for basically a whole month's worth of meals, it's hard.

So the process of ordering the groceries, to me, it's harder than going to a physical grocery store. It could be more natural. I have to know what I need, how much I need. I have to pick a time for the groceries to be delivered and be there when they do, or else the person will dump them on the street and get stolen. Making any recipe takes at least two hours, at least something that is good. Any easy recipe I find online is more challenging than it seems. If it says 15 minutes, it's probably 30 minutes. I even signed up for HelloFresh, which is a pre-measured food service. They send you all the ingredients, it's precut, pre-measured, whatever, and comes with the recipe, so it's supposed to make your life easier. And it does, a little bit, I'm not gonna lie, even the recipes are insane. Like, it says, "Oh, this recipe takes 30 minutes to complete." It took me two hours and I'm, like, "What is this, like it's just chicken and rice." I even stopped doing HelloFresh because it's expensive and takes up a lot of time. I mean, when I signed up, I did the free trial. I won't make a five-star meal on a Tuesday alone; that's insane. I don't know who these services' primary target audiences are, because it's definitely not college students. I once made this burger, and my brother said, "This is the best burger in my life." Like it had a special type of wine sauce, and the bun was in a certain way, and I'm, like, "This is what the recipe is," and I'm, like, "Like, what kind of recipe is this?" I don't think a normal person eats this, this is better than what you would find at Shake Shack. Anyways, I'm reaching, but I'm trying to say that even those services don't make sense.

See, it's a tough problem because it requires a community to fix this. If I could change anything, I would say, having a bigger cafeteria, like, the one at the hospital. Our cafeteria only sells coffee and snacks on the side, maybe some fried food, but nothing really healthy. And, personally, I don't like the staff that work there, they could be better.  The café has really limited options. When I first came to Opportunity, I was on Grubhub because that's how you order food from the café. I opened what I thought was our medical school's café and I was so impressed. I was like, "Wow they have salads, and pasta, and this, and that, and different cuisines." I think I ordered something, and then I waited. I'm, like, "Dang, where is it?" And then I don't get anything. I talked to my friend and they're, like, "Wait, you just ordered something through Opportunity’s other campus cafeteria. I'm like, "Wait, where's our cafeteria's options on Grubhub?" When I opened it, you should have seen my face, I was so disappointed. It was so disappointing. There was no real food there. It doesn't make sense to me, it's the same school, same institution, just a different city. Why can't you have better options at the medical school? I don't know, maybe it's because the hospital's nearby, so students can just walk over there.