Listen, I’ll tell you a secret.

Food is great. It’s what keeps you and me alive.

In my four years as a college student, I’ve learned what it takes to afford food and survive to see another day. First, it takes discipline, and second, it takes knowing which restaurant or grocery store has the best, most affordable food for your budget. How, might you ask, will we ever know what our options are for affordable food? Well, I’m glad I asked that for you, because I’m going to be telling you your options all quarter long.

Yeah, that’s right. Welcome to my column.

I can sympathize with all of you who can’t go out to eat or buy all the food you want. Times are tough, this I know. For that, I’ll tell you another secret: I’m a poor college student who punishes herself by watching “Top Chef” and “Iron Chef” when she’s hungry.

I can’t tell if I hate myself or if I’m feeding my goal of a more appetizing future. But one day as I sat there watching “Top Chef” season five with my roommates, my stomach growling because I only had a can of beans and tomato soup in the kitchen, I started looking at my life and looking at my food options and I started asking myself, “What are you doing? WHAT WHAT WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” (Sassy Gay Friend, anyone? Whatever, just YouTube it.)

The first thing I did was to look at my money in my bank account. I asked myself how much could I use for food, not how much I want to use. Once I figured out the pathetic amount of money I had left for food, I walked out the door for the most epic food journey of my life, or something like that.

Before I get into my epic food journey though, I should bring up how my food spending habits became so bad.

For my freshman year, I didn’t venture far outside of the campus vicinity because I had everything I needed on campus. I had the Segundo DC (considered the best dining commons out of the three) right outside my dorm window. They serve food four times a day, which includes a “make your own omelet” for breakfast and yummy cookies for late night.

Also in Segundo, I had the Junction, which used to be the Segundo DC until they built the bigger DC in 2005. At the Junction, they sell junk food, drinks and other convenience items that freshmen want to buy.

Located further inside campus are the ASUCD Coffee House and the Silo, located on opposite ends of campus. As a freshman, I would go to the CoHo at the Memorial Union when I wanted pizza, baked goods, a sandwich or a snack for cheap. Even though it is called the Coffee House, students rarely go there for coffee. Instead, I would go to the Silo for coffee. At the Silo, you can also get a smoothie, a deli sandwich or a crepe. The Silo is a tad more expensive than the CoHo, but is better quality food.

When I got sick of being on campus all the time, I would go to the U-Mall or Rite Aid, located on opposite corners of Anderson and Russell, and walking distance from the Segundo and Cuarto dorms. The U-Mall has places like Cost Plus, Starbucks, Subway, The Grad and others that are worthwhile to check out. As a freshman, I was spoiled.

Once I moved off-campus, I had no clue what I was doing. I didn’t know which grocery store was cheaper, which Chinese food restaurant had better chow mein or even which Mexican restaurant had a bigger combination platter. It was a food nightmare, unlike when I was nine and had a nightmare that involved mustard. I don’t know why.

But as I faced my food dilemma, I realized I wasn’t alone. Many students leaving the dorms to live off campus are suddenly overcome by many options, including what food to spend money on.

So during these next couple of weeks, I’m going to try to help by writing about what options you have for Chinese food, Mexican food, pizza, frozen yogurt, grocery stores, etc. You’ll be able to read about my epic food adventure, and hopefully try out some new places in the process.

For now, I’ll give you guys some quick pointers. For cheap pasta and grains, go to the North Davis Safeway. For cheap produce, go to Save-Mart. For obscure, cheap goods, there’s the Davis Food Co-op. And lastly, for the love of everything good in this world, go to the Nugget for their awesome sandwiches.

Now get out of here and feed yourselves!

JENNIFER RICHWOOD knows there are other people out there with food nightmares. If you have one, e-mail her at jcrichwood@ucdavis.edu.

The Republican Party has been stoutest in it criticism of President Obama’s stimulus and the size of government among other things. The Obama administration is belatedly trying to portray the Republicans as the party of “No.” Well, it turns out looking at history, they know a thing or two about how bloated government and spending failed to lift the U.S. from the Great Depression.

The economic stagnation and massive joblessness $800-plus billion later and 18 months into his presidency, has revved up public despair that plays in Republicans’ favor. One name comes to mind: Republican President Herbert Hoover. Too many things happen to, for lack of a better nomenclature, provide the same narrative; only this time perfectly backward.

The year was 1929; then it was Obama in 2009. Forget the 9s. The presidency and both houses on Capitol Hill were Republican-controlled. Hoover was essentially a free market or pro-business guy, a fiscal conservative. He also tried to rule on consensus among business, unions and all stakeholders. Didn’t work. He tried passing laws like the Agricultural Marketing Act, Hawley-Smoot Tariff and asked Congress for $423 million for public works programs to put Americans to work and alleviate the suffering. Does “shovel-ready jobs” come to mind, anybody? Obama in his first stimulus and his recent $50 billion infrastructure proposal touted that.

In Hoover’s case the initial 423 million was too small to affect the economy significantly. By the time the Stock Market crashed and there was a cascading effect on the global economy, Hoover passed his own variation of the modern-day Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) called the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC). It was enormous, budgeting $ 1.5 billion just for public works. Yup, this was another Wall Street-like bail out of the big banks. And again, it was both small and failed to engender the type of recovery that could lift the country out of the Great Depression. And even then it was not all spent. Does any this sound familiar?

This was not the days of cyber globalization and 24-hour news networks, but cynicism was not exactly absent in such dire times of universal despair among Americans. The strength of despair did not need sound bites or edited pictures to pervade the country. It was happening to you and your neighbor. Americans actually starved and queued for food and basic needs. There was little relief and no recovery. People started calling the burgeoning shanty towns “Hoovervilles.” War veterans took their case to Washington in protest of bonus owed them and built a tent city where Hoover could see them from the White House. Hoover charged the D.C. police to evict the eyesore caused by what was labeled the “Bonus Army,” but the veterans resisted. After some violence and continued stalemate the U.S. Army’s Third Calvary under General MacArthur had the onus of doing what most historians think was the final knell on Hoover’s presidency-the violent removal of the vets.

Now, let’s talk Barack Obama and the current crop of Republicans. Again the last digits rhyme. Just like Obama and the Democratic Party face midterms in 2010, Hoover did in 1930. Without prejudice, let me state that history has a nasty habit of repeating itself. On Hoover’s watch, the Democratic Party captured Congress and made significant grabs in the Senate. If polls are crystal balls, you make that call.

If the Republicans take over Congress and almost do so for Senate, it will not be because their “pledge” is a superior agenda for the country. It will be protest votes fuelled by the anti-incumbency wave sweeping the country. I don’t want to sound like I am lavishing credit on some conservative think tank with Carl Rove and others angling themselves strategically enough to capitalize on the ill-fortunes of the Obama presidency.

By just saying no to “big spending, big government,” the Republicans may just have mirrored history to know what works and what doesn’t under the circumstances. Hollering ‘fiscal responsibility’ at a time when HUGE sums of money should be injected into the economy, absent the normal federal bureaucracy, is going to thwart a deficit-ridden government from taking the steps needed to keep us out of this mess. Messaging is simple and their (Republicans) job is cut out for them.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration could have pulled this off had they treated the jobs and the economy or stimulus for that matter as the ONLY item on their laundry list. But stimulus was ticked off, while they went on to health care and a series of other otherwise, debatably, plausible legislation. But who cares? On Main Street it’s job, jobs, jobs. Let’s just say Republicans learned from their mistakes. They wrote the book on stimulus.

FAYIA SELLU can be reached at fmsellu@ucdavis.edu.

The Freshman 15 wasn’t always a source of anxiety for entering students. What was once known as the “freshman 10” has its origins in letters 19th-century college women sent home to their families to express their successful adjustment to college life. Food, as history professor Margaret Lowe found, was the center of social life for college women until the 1920s, when dieting became the new ethos on college campuses. Fast-forward 90 years and the term itself has gained five pounds, maybe from the weight of its negative connotation. But don’t put down your CoHo pizza slice just yet -there’s mixed evidence for the existence of this phenomenon.

Two professors from Carleton University analyzed 24 studies on the Freshman 15, collecting 3,401 cases to determine whether college freshmen do indeed gain weight. They concluded that there is both fact and fiction to the Freshman 15. While entering students do not, on average, gain the full 15 pounds, they do tend to put on 8.5 pounds through their first year of college.

So how does this happen, and what do we do about it?

“When students enter college and their environment changes, they change,” said Judith Stern, UC Davis nutrition professor and founder of the American Obesity Association.

College introduces change rapidly. We go from living with family to living in a dorm. We eat differently in our buffet-style dining commons. We make new friends, eventually forming a new social circle. We can have breaks between classes for hours. We stay up late, sleep in, and sometimes get no sleep at all.

Some of those changes, of course, are the usual suspects in the world of weight gain. Stress, which gets even the best of us, can cause overeating and even changes in our hormonal balance, leading to shifts in our metabolism and blood flow. Lack of sleep can change our appetite (not to mention, the longer you stay up, the more you eat – think late night runs to AMPM). But there are changes specific to college, too. The DC, which allows you to get however many refills of soda and seconds of food you want, doesn’t help. College students tend to drink more alcohol once they enter college, which leads to extra liquid calories, and arguably poor decision-making for the rest of the night. And then there are the munchies.

Though the changes are big, the fixes are small.

Drink at least 8 cups of water daily. Doing so cuts down on the extra calories, and drinking water helps to promote flexibility, detoxification and metabolism.

Eat a good breakfast. Starting your day hungry, while it seems to cut calories, actually serves to promote weight gain. This is because missing breakfast shifts your body into starvation mode, leading you to eat more later on.

Plan before eating. Every DC at UC Davis showcases their foods near the entrance. The next time you walk up to survey your options, take a second to plan your meal to the plate. Then stick to that one serving of Santa Fe Chicken Salad, two cups of water, and cookie to top things off.

Don’t get obsessed. It’s okay to eat sweets and indulge. Once in a while. As long as you don’t reward healthy eating with junk food, you’ll be building a sustainable habit. Everything in moderation.

Snack more, eat less. Instead of eating three large meals, or two uber-meals in a day (which often come out to more calories than 3 meals), eat 6 smaller-portioned foods throughout the day. Try a small breakfast in your dorm, a quick snack in lecture, a small lunch at the DC, a couple fruits in the library, a light dinner and a final snack to end the day’s eating two hours before you call it a night. The idea is to get neither hungry nor full.

Move. Unlike lots of students, most Aggies spend a fair amount of time biking or walking to class. In addition to this, hit the ARC for an hour. Studies show that physically active students are happier, healthier and do better in school.

A final piece of advice. Once every two weeks, hop on a scale to monitor your weight. If you can, try to separate your self-image from the number that displays. Tracking your weight is probably one of the best ways to keep it down. As Stern puts it, “Before you gain 15 pounds, you gain five.”

RAJIV NARAYAN gained the Freshman Negative 80, but he’s no purist. If you dig Yoloberry as much as he does, let him know when Irish Mint is the day’s flavor at rrnarayan@ucdavis.edu.