I like food. I like the texture, the smell, but most of all, I like the variety. I like to try new things and especially new restaurants. Being at a school with a student kitchen and being on a campus with a massive number of eateries ensures that we have limitless dining options.

I have to admit that fortune cookies have long been the highlight of my Chinese — well, Americanized Chinese — food experience. Fortune cookies are like the prize in the cereal box or the cheesy joke on the Popsicle stick. They're the Happy Meal toys of Chinese takeout.

I think I am obsessed with food.

I know, I know — it's been said, and it's been said again, but not all food, to be clear, is worthy of my adoration. Being obsessed with Food-In-General is crass and typical and indelicate and trite; food, like words, must be chosen with care whenever possible.

Now that Derald's has been gone for about four months, I can truly say that its absence has affected my life more than I originally thought it would.

The first day back from break one of the major things everyone noticed was one of the kitchen's vending machines being removed, where instead it was now replaced by the school's two refrigerators, totally messing up the feng shui of the kitchen. It was a big deal to walk into the kitchen and see a completely different arrangement.

Recently opened in the Market Place Mall area, Crazy Buffet (708 W. Town Center Blvd., Champaign) is a mostly Chinese buffet. It is a pretty decent place, with waiters standing nearby to pick up dirty dishes and refill water. They even came around to offer Sprite and Coke to the diners.

The bell rings and lunch has started. I rush down from my class on the second floor to get in line for pizza as quickly as possible.

When I reach the cafeteria, my heart sinks when I see a huge line that stretches all the way to the north entrance. I stand at the end of the line and am very boxed in from all the others waiting to get their pizzas.

I ate a grape for the first time today. It tasted very good.

After school this afternoon, I joined several of my friends to try out the cuisine at FlatTop Grill, near Sixth and Green Streets. I was expecting steaks and fried meat everywhere. How very wrong I was.

It was a Monday. Fourth-period calculus had just ended, and I was starving. I took out my wallet and saw that I had $3, enough money to get a sandwich. I quickly walked out of the south entrance, thinking whether I should get a bacon double cheeseburger or a triple. I took a few steps toward the crosswalk, a familiar daily route to the white truck where my lunch awaited. But to my surprise, it wasn’t there!

You are what you eat, as the saying goes. But do you know what you eat?

If someone handed you a bag containing a mixture of five to 10 chemicals with unfamiliar names, you probably wouldn’t think to eat from it — unless that bag was a bag of Doritos. As it were, I have looked at the ingredients list of such a bag. Besides the innocuous whole corn, corn oil, and salt, the list includes such esoteric items as disodium inosinate and disodium guanylate.