This is just to say
to whoever ate the plums
in the icebox
you could have just asked me if you could have one
my name was on the box
and i don’t have a meal plan
that was literally all i had to eat for the weekend and I was saving them for breakfast
so i hope you enjoyed them i guess
next time just ask
and honestly i would really
appreciate it if
you would apologize
like
so much depends upon an apology
slipped under a dorm room door
after lights out
This is just to say
that like im not MAD per se
i just wish that people would be honest
i wish people would be honest when they took my food
be responsible for yourself
This is just to say
i think its really WEIRD
that whoever took my plums
(and honestly I would have said yes if you had ASKED ME)
isnt coming forward?
Deny yourself all
half things. Have it
or leave it.
But it will keep—or
it is not worth
the having.
Never start
anything you can’t
finish—please dont TAKE A BITE
OUT OF MY PLUMS
AND THEN PUT THEM BACK IN THE FRIDGE
I HONESTLY FEEL LIKE THIS IS GETTING PERSONAL
WE’RE IN COLLEGE
LETS BE ADULTS PLEASE
I REALLY DONT WANT TO HAVE TO TALK TO KELSEY ABOUT THIS
BUT I WILL
okay and now we’re graduating to my ice cream
i can’t forgive this
it was so sweet
and so cold
the ice cream that had my name on it
real cool guys
honestly that ice cream was like six dollars
that’s really messed up
Tags: creed arms into a sea of haters, food, i too was an unrepentant college dorm food thief, no regrets, notes, poetry, theft, william carlos williams
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did that bitch take my yogurt
that yogurt was for my digestion
why would that bitch take my yogurt
Melis, you heroic dirtbag swine!
I loved best the person who said on Twitter they hid their ice-cream in backdated frozen casserole boxes.
I am well-removed from communal living (thank heavens) but that is a brilliant idea.
That’s where my grandmother hid her jewelry. I imagine she had to warm it up a bit when she wore it to parties.
Obviously the solution is to buy only non-perishables and keep them in a hidden and/or locked box under one’s bed, away from one’s roommate. Ramen, Clif bars, EasyMac. You know, hearty college student food that is also less than $1 per serving.
This. And never leave your precious graduation-gift-pan in sink to dry lest someone try to cook something in it, burn the foul food and leave it unwashed and crusty in the sink for the rest of the semester.
TOO REAL. back in college (many many years ago) I sent the following email to the dude who’d later become my husband:
subj: This Is Just to Say
That I did not end up going to the dining hall for dinner after all
Instead, I got into a fight with [high-school-best-friend-with-whom-friendship-was-rapidly-dissolving]
It was delicious
so sweet
and so cold
Steal my food, and I will not leave passive-agressive notes.
I will just murder you. No mercy.
I am a wild animal with food. I don’t share. The growl is the first warning, ignore it at your peril. I once stabbed a boy in the hand with a fork because he took a crisp without asking, do NOT TOUCH MY FUCKING FOOD.
I love you
When I offer to share food I AM LYING TO YOU TO SEEM POLITE AND I WANT YOU TO TURN ME DOWN.
My husband sometimes takes my food – I caught him eating my nice mints the other day – and it’s so frustrating because he is too big and burly to hurt physically, and emotionally he’s too fragile for hurting him to be satisfying.
“it’s so frustrating because he is too big and burly to hurt physically, and emotionally he’s too fragile for hurting him to be satisfying.”
I had to be reincarnated specially to die laughing even harder at this
Fortunately my inability to hold down a job hurts him financially, so I have that.
HE OWES ME SIX GLACIER MINTS AND I HOLD A GRUDGE
I think we are secretly related.
My brothers (all six of them) have figured out that hands-down the best way to turn me into a frothing mess is the following sequence of events:
::I head into the kitchen to make a snack::
Me: Does anyone want anything? (it’s not sharing if I make it FOR THEM AHEAD OF TIME and they know this)
Them: Nope! I/We am/are good!
::I make exactly as much food as I want to eat and take it to the table with a book::
::I take 2 bites::
Them: Hey! that looks good! Can I/we have half?
::they overwhelm my flailing defense through superior numbers while I shriek::
I have tried eating in my room, in a different room, making extra food, and waiting until they are out of the house. Nothing works.
I already mentioned this on the links post, but YES. REAL LIFE:
This is Mallory, obvs:
I’m with you. This particular feeling comes to a head when faced with family outings to restaurants where everyone shares the dishes. No, you cannot have any of the Steamed Cod With Garlic and Black Bean Sauce because I ordered it and it’s MINE and no, I don’t want any of your sweet and sour whatever as a trade-off.
Makes for, uh, awkward eating even when pre-stating “I am ordering “x” for me and me alone”.
See, I will happily give a tiny spoonful of mine in return for a LARGER spoonful of theirs, but only with people who have taste I trust.
‘No, you ordered the dullest thing on the menu, you do not get mine. It’s mine’.
I am a monster.
See, I managed to overcome the ‘selfish only child’ thing in ALL other aspects. But not this. NO YOU CANNOT HAVE MY FOOD DO NOT TAKE MY FOOD, IT STRIKES ME AS DEEPLY UNFAIR THAT EATING OTHER PEOPLES FOOD IS DISPLAYED AS SUCH A COMMON THING THAT THE COMPLAINANTS ARE THE UNREASONABLE ONES NO. THIS IS MINE. IF I WANT TO SHARE IT, I WILL, BUT I WILL NOT WANT TO SHARE IT.
There is a reason any dog will take your dang hand off at the wrist if you mess with its food. This is the most basic law of nature, and those who violate it are cosmic infractors.
oh my GOD right? No I do NOT want to share. MINE MINE MINE. I will take a container of bao for myself and another for the sharing fools at dim sum.
awww, I have to admit, I like doing that, even with my dad who will eat all your fries if you’re not careful. (But I know him, so I’m always careful.) This way I get a bunch of different kinds of food and try everything! When I go out to eat with my mother/family I don’t even want to get the same thing as them because then we don’t get to try more things.
ITT everyone’s a fucking monster and I’m never going to lunch with you
jesus how are you supposed to taste new and exciting things IF YOU DON’T SHARE
The barriers for ‘people I will share food with’ are more carefully policed than ‘people I will let inside me’
I will cook for you. I will take your advice on what to order. But you had better be someone I trust utterly if you expect to sahre food with me.
they treated the Baltics in 1945 with less care than you do your food
I am a broken human being and this is how it displays itself
Sometimes I think I keep my boyfriend around so that when I go to restaurants I get to taste two different things. At least I have stopped staring longingly at other people’s food to see if they’ll offer me a bite? I just want to taste all the things!
I am fundamentally incompatible with anyone who just wants to order one thing for themselves and not share. WHY. If my beloved didn’t like to share he would not be my beloved.
Solidarity – I once stabbed a boy in the hand with a fork because he went for the last bite of a pudding we were sharing. And he was a super cute boy, too, but I had no remorse or regrets. AND I got the last bite of Wom Kim pudding, so SUCK IT, HOT CHOIR GUY FROM COLLEGE.
OH GOD the last bite thing. My current boy doesn’t ask before finishing a thing that we’re sharing, and it DRIVES ME NUTS. Not enough to actually talk to him about it yet, but someday. SOMEDAY.
I read this with my hand over my mouth, then immediately shared it just before I died laughing
If it is true that there are only two types of people in the world, and your choice lies between being the Food Thief or being The Person Who Leaves Protective Food Notes, BECOME THE FOOD THIEF.
I avoid being either by being a combination food hoarder and threatener.
That is the only solution. I used to keep a tub under my bed with any non-perishables I didn’t want eaten. anything good that had to be refrigerated I would hide in old yogurt containers. I also made the switch from skim milk to 2% solely because my roommates only drank skim. Now anything under 2% is for all intents and purposes indistinguishable from water.
I was so goddamn happy the year I landed a room with a big window that opened, so that in winter I could just kinda wedge stuff between the pane and the screen to keep it semi-frozen and safe from grabby hands.
Well, until the screen came off one day. Sorry, meatbombed sidewalk dude!
When I moved into my current place, I very unwisely mentioned that we could all just share milk – forgetting that *I* am the one whose morning coffee routine requires milk, and that if my coffee doesn’t have milk I can’t drink it and am therefore in serious danger of burning the house down. This does not couple well with my roommate’s middle-of-the-night glass of milk.
It took two gallons of milk to figure this out. We don’t share anymore.
oh it is so easy to be both though. nobody hates a food thief like a food thief who thought they were the only one.
Anyone who is trying to claim moral high ground while writing passive-aggressive kitchen notes deserves to have their ice cream eaten, honestly.
I think I lucked out a lot and didn’t have that problem. My roommates and I were very laid back about…everything.
Though my last year, when I lived with people I wasn’t super close to – there was a lot of accidental eating of each other’s food because everyone bought the exact same thing and couldn’t tell them apart. So many bags of tortillas and shredded cheese. So many borrowed quesadillas.
My current housemate took a single egg for some reason I forget and then gave me a new egg to make up for it a few days later. I was kind of like, it’s one egg, it’s OK really, but if she thought it was important than whatever.
That’s so thoughtful, it’s kind of cute.
Too much tortilla and shredded cheese – this seems like the opposite of a problem…
Oh, it was never a problem for me. No one wanted to use anything since they didn’t know what belonging to who – and things tended to stay in the fridge for a while, so I would just help myself.
My current roommate (who’s a law school grad but apparently missed the day they went over that stealing is bad) does this all the time when I’ve baked something that I intend to bring to work/a friend’s/etc. I offered him something once, and now anytime I go elsewhere in the apartment for 5 minutes after pulling something out of the oven, a brownie is gone. THAT WAS A ONE-TIME ONLY OFFER, JUST ASK IF YOU CAN HAVE ONE YOU FUCK.
But you can’t bake things without making an extra one for each roommate. That’s just cruel. The whole apartment smells like brownies!
Last year I lived with a girl who would get stoned all the time and eat everyone else’s food. So we started putting our names on food because hello, yes, we’re all students on a budget here. You can’t expect to eat our food all the time if you never buy your own food so that we can retaliate! Then she had the gall to get angry about the fact that we labelled our food.
How very unstonerly of her. Everyone knows that, when you have munchies, you eat your own food, order out, or polish off those weird leftovers that no one is claiming.
I feel like in this case, you’re perfectly within your rights to smoke her pot. Or, if you don’t smoke, hide her pot until she replaces your food.
OMG WAS IT MALLORY
Sadly, no. She was a geology major, so I would always make rock puns around her but she either A) did not appreciate them and thus ignored them, or B) did not understand them. Either way, I think I’ve held a bigger grudge against her for her failure to appreciate rock puns than for her food thievery.
What kind of geology major doesn’t appreciate a good rock pun? Not gneiss.
A coworker labeled her milk “breast milk for Jess”. No one touched it.
My husband used to put green food colouring in his milk.
I’d say this is genius but he owes you six Glacier Mints so until he pays up, he gets no props from me.
With interest, it’ll be a whole big pack of them by the end of the month.
Entirely fair.
Best idea.
I’m realizing that I have developed a complicated system of morality around this subject over the years. Never leave protective notes, but putting your name on things is ok if you do not have a designated shelf [because there might be two of something and we need to know who is responsible for rotting things]. Never eat noticeable amounts of someone else’s food, but using little bits of sauce or creamer is ok, and you can eat a couple chips if they leave the bag open on the counter but not if they fold it over or put it away.
Of course, if I find the food I thought I had in the fridge is gone, I always just assume I ate it and forgot. Better for my mental health than roommate-inquisition.
This is neurotic and exhausting and why a simple policy of occasionally leaving unmarked sandwiches garnished with dish soap in the fridge is like the Hammurabic Code of establishing a civilized shared housing situation.
The system in my current house is pretty OK, we have our own shelves in the refrigerator and pantry but share things like olive oil and spices. Plus there are some random nonperishables around if we need them (like random dry pasta). Sometimes I will sneak a bit of milk from my housemates if I want some cereal and forgot to buy it, and I assume they do the same for me, but mostly it works out well.
We are older, though, so maybe that helps.
“A complicated system of morality” would make a great Culture ship name.
I once lived with a girl who would leave passive aggressive notes about people using too much toilet paper, so, since then, I’ve really cut back on my judgement of people being over protective of food. IT CAN ALWAYS GET WORSE.
Eh, I lived with someone who used to dot the i’s on her notes with hearts. It is the single most offensive thing I have ever seen handwritten, stab stab stab.
You lived with Stacey McGill?
I had a roommate who came into the apartment at the beginning of the semester with one of those giant 72 roll packages of toilet paper. We had 6 girls in the house. She refused to do any buying of communal cleaning supplies/toilet paper/etc for the rest of the year because she had contributed that one package of toilet paper. (which, let’s be honest, 6 girls went through that 72 pack within like 2 or 3 weeks, but 4 months later she’s still refusing to contribute.)
Yet that same roommate was an unrepentant eater of other people’s food. We all knew she was the culprit because she had been caught multiple times. It was another roommate’s birthday, and the birthday girl had gotten a cake from a friend; she went out without having had a piece yet and comes back to find over half of it had been eaten. We all knew food thief was the one who had eaten it; but the birthday roommate put up a general note complaining about her own birthday cake being mostly gone before she got her share. The food thief than adds an addendum on the note, trying to hide her tracks presumably, saying that it WAS really uncool to eat someone else’s cake and the thief should fess up because she didn’t want to live in a house where people would steal other’s food like that.
In this case, I feel like you are allowed to eat all her food AND put something unpleasant in her bed, like slugs or wilted lettuce.
I had a roommate who used a bunch of good toilet paper, and when it was his turn to buy, he cheaped out and bought the shitty toilet paper. He pretty much did that with every shared purchase.
We ended up having a hiding spot for the good stuff, and just let him use his shitty stuff.
You can tell the new fish to shared housing by how she has not considered the horror of people who don’t use enough toilet paper
I share my bathroom with a (very tidy) male roommate, so I have tried to make sure I’m buying more toilet paper than he is. It’s only fair. I bought some the other day and he comes home and says, “Oh hey! Magic toilet paper!”
NO. I purchased that and brought it home in a spirit of roommate peace. It’s not magic. Neither is how the dishes move from the sink to the dishwasher and back into the cupboard.
My roommate in college got sent a Junior’s cheesecake for her birthday and she wrote a note on the box saying essentially, “This is my birthday cake that my mother sent me, and we moved to California when I was in high school, so I haven’t had Junior’s in years, so PLEASE DON’T EAT THIS” and that cake was GONE in the morning
(Our other roommate and I bought her a new cheesecake and left a note pretending we were a cheesecake-powered superhero who had been in the area fighting crime and desperately needed that cheesecake to aid him in his fight for Good, but I’m not sure how much it helped. Dorm fridges turn college students into monsters.)
I feel like stealing treat-foods is especially bad. These are often expensive things, that you wouldn’t buy and eat that often, and just… taking them is a goddamn act of war as far as I’m concerned.
The sort of monster that just steals someone elses expensive treat food is the sort of monster that cannot be allowed to walk among normal people.
Agreed! It was her birthday cake, for the love of god. If they’d just asked nicely to try some she probably would’ve shared. I know all these comments are all in good fun, but I think I’d be really kind of upset if that happened to me.
I have food allergies, which means (among other things) I have to vet my treat food carefully and I can’t share utensils; the worst feeling in the world is discovering someone has put their potentially contaminated forks into your special allergen-free cake and you now can’t eat any of it safely. That’s seriously the end of friendship, right there.
God your roommate was way too nice. You need to go the “U EAT THIS U DIE” route with these things. Short and sweet, college kids don’t have a long attention span.
I know! She was trying to be as nice as possible in order to really impress upon them her sentimental attachment to this cake, but we’re pretty sure whoever took it was high as BALLS and so maybe wasn’t up to reading her sweet, looping cursive.
oh shit isn’t that just what happened in The Secret History when Bunny came over and told Richard about what happened in Italy and he was so drunk he stole and ate the cheesecake even though it had a note on it saying Please do not eat this?
IT IS
tell your college roommate that the fellow who ate her cheesecake got murdered later, it will make her feel better. and tell her her life is a storybook.
I got real confused for a minute there because at my alma mater there is a dormatory named after William Carlos Williams. I lived in the one named after Millicent Fenwick, and I thought that was pretty cool.
SIGH why do I even write poetry anymore, ffs, I’m putting down my pen.
I feel like I must be the only person in the world who has not experienced communal fridge drama.
Same here. I share a fridge now, but it’s very drama-free. In the dorms I didn’t have a fridge and ate at the dining hall, and then I had a single roommate in an apartment for a while, and then my own place until I moved abroad to grad school. And then even when I had seven roommates that one year there still wasn’t fridge drama.
I had no fridge drama with my grad school roommates, but we sure as heck had thermostat and phone bill drama. (This was in the Mesozoic Era, when everyone shared a landline and had to go through the itemized AT&T bill to see who’d made what long-distance calls.)
I just… don’t eat things I think people will miss? And then yell occasionally if I’ve bought most of the food for a month (I probably buy like two thirds of the groceries my roommate and I eat but like, whatever, I outearn him and will crush him when the revolution comes so, probably fair?)
wow guys.
I feel physically uncomfortable if I don’t offer to share my food with others, and I also feel kind of weirded out if others don’t share food — it’s kind of a “we are humans, world is full of suffering, must share food of solidarity out here on the veldt” thing.
Out on the veldt if you eat all my Ben&Jerrys and put the empty container back in the freezer I will ambush you and stove your head in with a thighbone.
hello everyone. somebody who reads twitter has to blow Mallory’s cover and I guess it’s me. but the truth is she is an avowed and unrepentant food thief!!!!!!!
That’s already in the tags, though.
DYING OF SHAME
but secure in the knowledge that I am an upstanding socialist non-food stealer who always has the feelings of my fellow refrigerator-users in mind when I gaze upon their frozen Amy’s meals
God…so many horrible flashbacks to this type of passive aggressive college note shaming. Always the same damn people. I just decorated my food with post-it notes of a skull and crossbones.
ONE OF THESE ITEMS
I HAVE LICKED
MAKE YOUR CHOICE
My roommates and I are all NINETEEN YEARS OLD and you know what
WE BUY OUR FOOD TOGETHER
and this is how i will be feeling smug about my maturity level today compared to y’all
also Nick Pavich/Nicole what is the font for the comments, i love it, the capitals are all weird and uneven heights
Buying food together worked for a big meal on the weekends, but we were pretty into the dining hall/food court. And by big meal, I usually mean “someone’s making hamburger helper.”
My sophomore year roommates and I bought food together but one of the other people was a HUGE stickler (like, down to the penny) about sharing costs, and then another one was like “I’ll just live on nothing but toast and corn dogs” and it was a catastrofuck.
I want to print out the first verse and frame it on my wall because that is beautiful.
Laxatives in the food. I always wished I had the courage to do it.
I’d still take it.
I’ve never left a passive-aggressive note, but this hit a little close to home. The concept of Mine (especially when food is involved) is a very strong and sacred force in my life. Things that are Mine are very much mine, and not at all yours unless I offer.
My one-and-only experience with shared kitchen storage was studying abroad in England, where everyone on the hall had their own little cabinet in the kitchenette. I knew better than to keep my smuggled American peanut butter there, but the night I came home drunk and wanting nothing more than peanut butter toast to find that some mustache-twirling villain had stolen my ENTIRE LOAF OF BREAD I experienced a rage I have never felt before or since. Psh to passive-aggressive notes, I wrote a straight up AGGRESSIVE-AGGRESSIVE screed rife with “fucks” and left it on my cabinet door for a week. Seriously, it was like a 50p loaf from Tesco, YOU CAN AFFORD YOUR OWN, MYSTERY JERK.
PS: It has been like 8 years and I am still mad just thinking about it.
PPS: But then again I did steal a splash of someone’s real milk from my job’s break room today so I wouldn’t have to use gross Dunkin’ Donuts-flavored creamer in my terrible office coffee so perhaps I have learned nothing.
I left an angry note to the person who had been stealing my food for weeks, and then they broke all my eggs and put my butter in the freezer.
Man, what is WRONG with people??
I realize that I am late to this party but I LIVE IN A HOUSE WITH 12 OTHER COLLEGE STUDENTS. I HAVE ONE HALF OF ONE FRIDGE SHELF. We are actually pretty good about not eating each other’s food/sharing things but goddamn I am tired of figuring out the best way to stack my lemons on top of my eggs on top of my milk.
My roomie in college would buy these delicious treats and offer to split them with me, then wouldn’t eat them as fast as I would. And I’d be like, “I’ve eaten 3 of the 6 popsicles, I can’t have any more, the rest are hers, that is fair and even and….OH GOD EAT A DAMN POPSICLE, WOULD YOU?” and then she would leave them in there for months and I’d cry myself to sleep at night.
Oh noooooo that is the WORST
“that’s really messed up”
such a great last line. A+
I love love love this and I am old.