While reading the newspaper the other morning, I was struck by a supermarket’s full-page ad featuring just eight sale items: Pepsi products, Twinkies and/or Hostess Cup Cakes, Miracle Whip, Cheerios, fun-size Snickers (aka Halloween candy out of season), apples, Handi Snacks pudding cups and Little Debbie snack cakes.

Experiencing a moment of cognitive dissonance, I read the list of sale items off to my husband and asked, “What kind of groceries are those?”

“The students are back,” he replied, without looking up from his own section of the newspaper.

Indeed, when I looked again at the ad I noticed that across the top of the page the prices on these items were billed as “A+ Savings.” This is marketing-speak for “Junk food. Cheap.” I was shocked that I hadn’t recognized this immediately, given that I spend a good deal of my life circulating among college students.

Living within 15 miles of three institutions of higher education has many charms, but it also means that for nine months of the year we navigate the same traffic grid as more than 20,000 drivers under the age of 23, stand in line for seats at popular restaurants and witness the unseemly spectacle of grocery stores, which also sell actual food, trying to appeal to a segment of the market that thrives on empty calories.

I sense that this ad was prepared by someone who felt a pang of guilt about all the sugared carbohydrates being marketed to our young people. I suspect that’s what the apples are doing down in the corner of the ad. It’s probably a redemption thing. When people like me complain about all of the non-nutritious “food” in the ad, this provides cover for whoever is responsible.

The presence of Miracle Whip in the ad also sends a mixed message. From a marketing standpoint it might be seen as a subliminal suggestion that college students buy the fixings for nutritious meat and cheese sandwiches at the regular price and then slather them with sale-priced Miracle Whip. In this scenario, the Miracle Whip is the bait for a bigger purchase, and it assumes that college students will have the money to buy the more expensive sandwich ingredients. As it happens, many financially strapped college students subsist on Miracle Whip or mayonnaise “sandwiches” – once the meat and cheese are long gone – if in fact it was there to begin with.

Even if many college students eat poorly, they often are impressively creative in what they do to get by. I have known college students to make a 10-pound bag of potatoes, some cheese and a couple of onions keep their motors running for a couple of weeks.

However, the staple of the impoverished student’s diet is ramen noodles. A different supermarket chain than the one with Pepsi and Twinkies on sale ran a special last week on Top Ramen: a case of 24 three-ounce envelopes for $1.99. While the ramen special received only a small notation in the grocery chain’s weekly ad, one of its supermarkets positioned a giant pyramid of ramen cases near the entrance to the store, forcing every shopper to gaze upon the enormity of this special offer.

At the sale price, ramen costs about 8.3 cents per envelope and, when it comes to nutrients, you get what you pay for. The ingredient list is short: flour, water, salt, dough conditioner and seasonings.

Because the flavored ramen sold in grocery stores has no real substance, I have concluded that eating ramen is really just a college rite of passage that makes no sense except as a social ritual. Because ramen is quasi-foreign, it also may bring an element of international intrigue to the student diet. But nutrition it does not.

I don’t mean to single out students of modest means because even students who are not living on a tight budget often eat poorly. When I teach classes before noon, I see an odd assortment of junk food that passes for breakfast consumed in the classroom. Pop-Tarts are the enduring favorite year in and year out (those with the sprinkles in the frosting being especially popular), followed by foods in the Twinkie genre.

Parents may delude themselves into thinking that their college-age children are observing the rules of nutrition and building a balanced menu each day from the appropriate food groups, but the real food pyramid in their world is that mountain of ramen. The grocery store marketing people have it all figured out.