The best ways to avoid getting your food stolen in halls

At every university in the country, whether you’re north or south, halls have a serious food thief issue. It’s becoming a national crisis and something needs to be done.

Not ok

Name your food

Buy a sharpie, name your food. Black is recommended. Labelling food is the first step to nailing the thief. It probably won’t stop them, but it might give them a little bit of guilt about taking it. It’s liking them stealing a little piece of you, it really breaks my heart.

Don’t touch my pizza

Tie all your named food into a shopping bag

This is one step up. It clusters the fridge and it’s an annoyance to open every time you want to get your food and you put your dairy with your meat BUT it does delay the burglar and it’s more likely that you will catch them. They may panic and not get to the food in time before scuttling off back to their room filled with past glories of other flatmates. Oh, food still needs to be named in the bag. Name the bag as well, and tie it tight, double bow.

Room raid

When at this stage, it’s not so funny anymore. It’s escalated from a slice of ham to a Corona on a Sunday evening. You can check rooms, but at this stage the thief may be expecting such a step. They may have cleared their bins, but the threat of a raid may force them to put the food back in the fridge, or you’ll catch them and you can punish them in whatever way you please. Mwahaha.

Yeah and then they drank my J Dan

Phone CCTV

You’re all royally pissed off at this point. This is no longer a joke. I mean in our block we actually had someone eat the chicken off the bones and put the bones back in the packet. We’ve had chunks bitten out of ham, expensive prescription juice stolen and other mildly amusing trickery.

It’s at the point where you need to set up a camera and give up their phone for the night (which is a huge deal as we all know, Whatsapp groups may just fall apart). This can cause problems though: what if the thief is actually a criminal and steals your phone? What if the criminal works out what’s happening? It may work though and you may catch the fool.

This is just the beginning

Setting traps

We got a rape alarm at the beginning of term, and finally it was put to good use. Obviously, none of us ever took ours out of the box, but now we found out that when we pull the ring, the alarm goes off and doesn’t stop. We attached the ring to a piece of string and stuck it to the ground, and the other end of the string to the wall the other side of the door. It did work, it went off, but the poor soul we caught was someone filling up their water bottle. THIS MEANS WAR. Setting traps (not genuinely dangerous ones) is the best way to freak someone else out. Yes, we’ve gone batshit insane, and yes you should be fucking scared.

Good luck sneaking into the fridge without anyone hearing you now

Taking it any further might become slightly ridiculous (more than it is already). But I suppose you could set up actual CCTV. But the money you’d need for that has probably already been spent replacing the food you had stolen. Ultimately it’s very unlikely you will catch the killer until very late on in the year, but when you do, sweet sweet revenge. They repay your debt. You get tight, sneaky fat fuck. Stealing food is not ok, and sometimes you have to stand up for what is right. Good steed fellow sufferers, and good luck.

This is the extreme of the extreme