Toby Harris: What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine

Being a student is a time to share accommodation, meet new people and inevitably share a fridge – a recipe for food and the potential for disaster.

Shared shelves, lockers and communal purchases are the grey area of student living. What to share and what we can rightfully claim to be ours without being judged as; mean, uptight, unfriendly and uncooperative is a tough topic to broach.

 The utopian ideal demands reciprocity – the golden rule to sharing. If the giver keeps on giving and the taker keeps on taking, resentment strikes and the arrangement crumbles faster than a poorly baked pan au chocolat. That single pastry may only cost £0.75, but after the sixth one, that’s £4.50 down along with a plate full of disappointment that comes free.

You want to be able to borrow on a spontaneous, impromptu basis without all hell breaking loose. At the same time, one doesn’t expect their cereal to be opened and 2/3 of it to be eaten before having the opportunity to eat any yourself. The challenge is that one doesn’t want to be a hoarder that adopts “the lock and key” method, refuting any attempt to share. You know the type that crawls out of their miserable hovel with the keychain and padlock key around their neck. They’re the ones that only enter the communal areas when everybody else has vacated so to never reveal the holy grail of all food stashes in public. Nobody wants to carry the necessary breakfast ingredients out from their clasp as they move from bedroom to kitchen. It’s social suicide to approach the kitchen with the very goods that one should be going to the kitchen to source. Those that most try to protect their items are the most desired victims of food theft. The moment that anything becomes unguarded, it won’t hang around for long. 

Common communal purchases, such as condiments, are usually purchased on a rotational scale – fair game. Spreads and cereals are the nemesis because they are unquantifiable – if a bit goes missing – nobody knows…and everybody knows that. Also, you sound like a paranoid, nit-picking loser if you keep a detailed account of your eating pattern in an attempt to monitor if anyone else has attacked it.

Why are we not able to say, “Enough is enough!” without being embarrassed? Well, because it sounds as if you’re a miserable, uptight, anti-socialite if you do. Nonetheless, if it goes on for too long, people think these goods materialise each time without a second thought.

Theoretically, one is well within their right to bring this repeated violation of the unwritten rule of reciprocity to the attention of the potential perpetrators but practically, few people have the conviction to carry it out. If you don’t have proof of all the individual cases documented then your accusations are unfounded but if you have the necessary record in a journal or diary, you appear like a total dingbat.

Food theft can place a hefty burden on shopping patterns. What do you do if you want to buy a pallet of grapes but you’re acutely aware that if you leave them in the fridge for a few hours, by the time you return, the majority of them will be demolished? It leads to a mentality of, “eat them all at once or not at all”. Our purchases should not be restricted by the greed and petty theft of others. However, excess to deprivation of these quantitative purchases appears to be the only way to avoid confronting those around you (to not appear petty) whilst also eliminating the searing resentment towards food thieves that magically appear after restocking the supplies.