Students Stuff Themselves

Thanks for your article Dave, but please resize your pics to 500 pixels in width before posting. You can use free software such as Gimp to do this.

In universities about 10% of students become Veggie and about 1% Vegan by the time these same student's leave the Veggie percentage has dropped to 3% and Vegan's stayed the same at about 1% I wonder why ?

The biggest group who become Veggie are young women and they are the the most likely to remain so with 40% of them staying Veggie for at least five years after leaving university for men less than 1% remain veggie by the time they have left university for three years.

In my case, boredom. I got really bored with eating vegan food. I know that many claim it can be interesting but that simnply was not my experience.

I'm now mostly veggie but with the occasional bacon sandwich !

O and please I don't need to read posts from people telling how vegan food is really tasty, how there are lots of wonderfull recepies etc etc . I got enougn of that when I gave up.

Thanks

Just a constructive comment - why didn't you give any of the food to the workers, who are currently battling it out against their dodgy management who are trying to kick out the union? they held a massive demo and rally there yesterday. if the same happens again, you could go and be nice to them too. unlike their bosses...

I became vegan before I was a student, so its just 37 years now. All my children too - 25 years, 22 years,19 years and 16 years. Can't see what you found boring - can you cook? As most of the world is on a plant based diet it seems odd that you couldnt find something.
But then, its not about boredom, its about ethics - land available for production when a lot of the world is hungry, consuming second hand protein and too much of it, issues around production and universal rights, placing self interest and individual consumerism against global issues, and all those issues.

Sorry you didnt make it.

Just a minor quibble, but to say "hungry, poverty stricken students at NTU" is a bit nonsensical.

I work at NTU, and have seen few (if any) such students there.

Most have mobile phones, laptop computers, iPods, expensive taste in clothing, and far more disposable cash than you or I do. Plenty enjoy regular nights out on the town, and many even reside in luxurious all-mod-cons accommodation.

Not knocking the vegan food giveaway - that's obviously a great thing, and I'm glad the students enjoyed the free food. I also think it's great to get students interested in more ethical eating, at a time when many probably don't care in the slightest where their food comes from, or what their lifestyle is costing the planet. That is a noble cause indeed.

But it's a little silly to describe NTU students as "poverty stricken", when they're broadly from quite affluent middle class backgrounds, attending one of the most middle class institutions known to our society.

Poverty does exist in Nottingham, but however skint they think they are and however much they "slum it", those who can afford to go to university are rarely living in it.

Of course I would like "being able to afford it" to be irrelevant when it comes to going to university, and to see more people from poorer backgrounds able to attend. But let's not kid ourselves about the affluence of the average student in this day and age! (Admittedly for many, it will mean being in debt forever - and this is of course part of the bigger "plan" of permanently shackling as many of them as possible into middle class pursuits like having a career in order to maintain their high consumption lifestyle, rather than say, getting politically active.)

But as far as I can tell (and I'm not necessarily criticising them for it, having done the same in the past myself when I was a student), many students appear to regularly spend in one night what I would spend in a week or more. That is not poverty, by any stretch of the imagination.

Do you have any idea of how hard it is to be a student in Britain these days ?

We have no grants, student loans up to our eyeballs and massive pressure. I would love to have a nice safe, index linked civil service job like yours, no pressure, no responsibility, no real work. You've got it made and you don't even realise it.

Students like me are the future of this country and we should be paid for studying not having to pay fees and accommodation costs and other expenses. At the next NUS meeting there will be a proposal for a minimum wage of £20,000 pa for all UK students to allow us to study without financial worries. I hope you and your colleagues in your easy street jobs will understand the importance of supporting the proposal.

"Do you have any idea of how hard it is to be a student in Britain these days?"

Of course I have an idea how hard it is to be a student in Britain these days. Many of my friends are still students. I was one less than 10 years ago myself, and am still saddled with the debt, which I will probably never be able to pay off.

But it "being hard to be a student" does not equate to living in poverty. You may have not noticed, but to varying degrees, life actually *IS* hard in Britain these days for almost everybody, other than a handful of wealthy elite (and even their world is starting to crumble a bit). To be frank, even though life in Britain isn't all great, we've got it a damn sight better (at least in terms of poverty) than most of the rest of the world.

So with respect, I really don't think you know what you're talking about when it comes to real poverty. Even I hardly know what I'm talking about when it comes to real poverty - but I just don't think it's a word that should be brandished about and watered down willy-nilly, hence my previous posting on the subject.

I think it's a fair observation that although most students are pretty skint, very, VERY few are living in actual poverty. As in, living on the street, or with no clean water to drink, or unable to afford to feed themselves.

Poverty is of course a sliding scale, and maybe you are on it. I still don't believe that the majority of students are, though.

Perhaps you'd like to enlighten us about just how hard your life really is? (That's an honest offer, in which I will eat my words if you're living in poverty, and will be remarkably open to you coming up with your own definition of poverty, relevant to your circumstances.)

"We have no grants, student loans up to our eyeballs and massive pressure. I would love to have a nice safe, index linked civil service job like yours, no pressure, no responsibility, no real work. You've got it made and you don't even realise it."

I have not got it made. In fact, I can barely make ends meet myself, though I'm not living in poverty either (though perhaps technically, from my total household income, I would be classed as so). Part time work at a university when I can get it just about covers living expenses. In some ways I'd gladly take more hours there, as the pay eases my constant financial struggle quite well. But I can't get the hours, so I spend my time working on other things, plenty of them unpaid, just for stuff I give a shit about.

My "civil service job" with no pressure, no responsibility, no real work? Riiiiight, that's why I still don't even know if I'm employed this term, is it? (Actually, I'm hazarding a guess that I'm not.)

The job you criticise me for doesn't even exist.

Your assumptions about my job are wrong, without exception. You can also trust me that as much as I enjoy aspects of my work there, I'm only doing it because I have a partner and a family who depend on me for support. I don't actually want to be doing this for a living - to be honest, I'd rather just be living than wasting days of my life teaching people who can't even be bothered to turn up half the time.

But the world is often an uncaring place, and is full of "massive pressure", as you put it. Far more "massive pressure" than I ever experienced even in my final year at university, and hence I have to do this, because if I don't, the uncaring face of capitalist Britain will shit on me and mine from a great height. I guess I'm at least lucky that I have a skill that I can use to pay the bills from time to time. I do not live (and indeed, could not afford) an extravagant lifestyle. No car, no TV here, and I dress myself almost exclusively from the charity shop.

Your assumptions about me and my job are just plain wrong. (Which is fair enough - I was trying not to give away too many details.)

Perhaps my assumptions about the average student are wrong too? But having been one less than 10 years ago, and having witnessed those I come into contact with (who are all really nice and a pleasure to teach, by the way), I still get the impression they wouldn't know real poverty if it smacked them in the face. Forgive me if extrapolating my experience with them on to the rest of the student population is a mistake, but I still think that's largely an accurate statement.

In my experience, life gets harder when you finish uni - a LOT harder.

"Students like me are the future of this country and we should be paid for studying not having to pay fees and accommodation costs and other expenses."

I agree with you there. I think you should get certainly your studying expenses paid (or rather, it should count as a continuation of school and thus be funded in the same way), and contributions towards your living expenses too (up to a reasonable point).

But the fact is, somebody has got to pay for that. You'll probably realise once you get out of university that the jobs just aren't there - or perhaps they are, if you entirely prostitute any shreds of principles you may have. So this whole "future of the country" thing you were promised was utter bullcrap, unless you want to live in some kind of dog-eat-dog capitalist shit-pit (which we already do, though perhaps not for too much longer).

The country does not care about us, so why should we care about the country?

Sorry to break it to you. If I could go back in time 10 years, I would tell myself not to go to university, because apart from the friends I made, it absolutely wasn't worth it. I have a good degree in an in-demand subject. But unless I sell myself wholesale on the alter of capitalism, I might as well have chocolate teapot for all the good my degree actually does me.

"At the next NUS meeting there will be a proposal for a minimum wage of £20,000 pa for all UK students to allow us to study without financial worries. I hope you and your colleagues in your easy street jobs will understand the importance of supporting the proposal."

I can't speak for my colleagues. In a roundabout way, I support your proposal. I think your education should be free, and that you should receive plenty of help with your living expenses. Unfortunately our world doesn't seem to work like that yet.

I could very easily spend a lot less time trying to bring that about. Or a lot more, if it wasn't for the fact that the only thing we can rely on the state for is to take us for everything they can get from us, and more. So for now, I'm stuck teaching you (if my job still exists this year).

£20,000 a year? I make that £384.32 a week. That's over 3 times the pension credit I live on. OK, 2.5 times if you count housing benefit. That makes me twice as rich as some of my friends who're living on other benefits. I could well be more than twice as rich as other friends and neighbours earning minimum wages (or sometimes less) in insecure or part-time jobs, once things like fares to work are counted.

Some people in that position, especially those with children and/or with little or no capacity to play the system the way middle-class people can, really are living in poverty. So are those who will suffer ill-health or even death this winter because they can't afford to heat damp, draughty homes properly. So what about this free cavity wall insulation the government is bragging about? Bugger all use if you live on a knackered old council estate which doesn't even have cavity walls, like I do.

And that's just poverty in the UK including, I'm sure, corners of Nottingham you probably know nowt about. NTU Worker rightly mentions many more people in much deeper systemic poverty in other parts of the world. They add up to a substantial proportion of humanity.

You might get another view of poverty from a bit of social history. My aunts and grandmother -now long gone- knew the "score" of other women in their community. "She had 7 and buried 3" or "had 5 and buried 2" etc. That was normal in the early 20th century in working class communities. That was poverty. Even they were never as badly off as others, taking pride in the fact they always had shoes as children, when many didn't. Even my father (much younger than my aunts) was at school with boys who didn't have shoes in the 1920s and early '30s. If shoes could be afforded at all, girls got priority, apparently. Well, they were unlikely to get priority on much else in their lifes!

I'm not living in poverty or anything like it, and I doubt you are either. Yes, student loans sound like a horrible racket, tying people to debt and crappy jobs for years to come, but it ain't poverty. Not yet, anyway.

Though NTU Worker's points are well made, I must say I read the "poverty sticken" bit of the OP as tongue in cheek. Obviously, he didn't.