City College is almost a student utopia. There are beautiful girls everywhere, it’s always summer, teachers are great, and the environment is laid back. It’s like a vacation resort with a good education.

But there’s no edible food, so actually it’s more like a mirage than an oasis. Especially for fellow vegetarians, SBCC is not a hunger- or health-friendly place to study.

Take the East Campus cafeteria, for example, where you can either overdose on high fructose corn syrup or clog your brain with hormone-injected processed meat chunks. You can drown yourself with a variety of sodas and chemical-flavored waters. Shelves are lined with cheap, sugary pastries, potato chips and candy. Eating here is passive-aggressive suicide at it’s best, and it’s just as expensive as hard drugs. Why bother?

Vegetarians stand anxiously, trying to pick their poison. Others have teary eyes; there’s nothing to eat. We’ve already had the all-bean veggie burrito to death, and we’re still a little ill from our last helping of the overcooked vegetable melody. We could over-pay for a bland iceberg lettuce garden salad, but I usually opt out for Doritos and Mountain Dew. God help me if I make it through a week.

If you’re a lucky-enough vegetarian and have time during the one minute that the sandwich place is open in the dining room, then you can get a decent price on a veggie sandwich that’s good enough to survive on for a while. Thankfully, you can always drink a Naked Juice or grab a banana, if you’re in a hurry. There’s watermelon, and occasionally an orange in the salad bar. Once and a while there is broccoli for $1.25 or potatoes for the same price. On the blue moon, there’s macaroni with butter and some kind of spice lathered on it; it’s almost worth buying.

But mostly, you’d be a lot better off bringing a picnic to school. However, most of us don’t have the time to prepare our own food.

The rest of the campus is more of the same. The snack place in front of East Campus is just greasy fried food that’s been sitting for hours under a heat lamp. It’s inedible.

West Campus is not even worth mentioning, except for its vegetarian chili, which saves the day sometimes. There is a grilled cheese sandwich at the JSB Cafe. It’s good, but they put chicken stock in their soup, and you have to buy the soup with every sandwich.

No matter what you buy here, the food is overpriced to the point of insulting. I was once charged $2.50 for one orange. The lady who runs the East Campus cafeteria told me that the price was because the orange was organic. Nobody told her that we’re living in California, where all of the oranges are grown.

There isn’t anything we can do but complain. Like every one else at Santa Barbara City College, our schedules are too busy to hop into politics at school and change things. So the campus cafeteria wins. If the lady who runs the cafeteria is reading this right now, she’s probably counting money and laughing.

It seems like we’re all too weak from malnutrition to fight it. We should take a multivitamin and fall asleep.