Cooking is simply defined as the comfort of having a friend home, of filling the house with something warm and intentional. Piper Cheney / Daily Nexus

Food has become the main way love moves through our small Isla Vista house. It lingers in the kitchen as a pot simmers on the stove or a cutting board dries by the sink. Food is simply our love language at home. 

All UC Santa Barbara students are painfully aware of the housing crisis that riddles the streets of Isla Vista. Students are practically living on top of each other in houses that feel as though they should not pass any county test. All this while paying double of what their friends in San Luis Obispo pay for a single with a private bathroom. My house this year is especially small — it is literally nicknamed “Tiny.” The house is made of pretty much a long hallway, so narrow that you could stick both of your hands out and have your palms hit both of the poorly insulated walls. 

The eight of us, however, have learned to love this kind of living — not because of how small it is, but because living this close has made us close (or maybe we’ve just been brainwashed by Playa Life after all these years). Friendships have been formed in the small lofts we call home. More often than not, we end up piled into the same bed after a night out, even though our own beds are only a few feet away. You can’t leave the house for a Starbucks run without inviting those who linger in the hallway. The close living formed our bond. 

Living with eight people in such a small space probably sounds overwhelming and overstimulating — it did to me the summer weeks leading up to move-in. But, it turns out it’s rare for eight college kids’ schedules to line up at the same time. Between classes, sororities and all the extracurricular activities in between, it’s difficult to find even half of us at home at the same time. 

Our house is often quiet in unexpected ways; doors opening and closing, footsteps passing through, but rarely is everyone together. The exception is our blue- and white-tiled kitchen that overlooks the ocean. No matter how scattered we are, someone is almost always there, standing at the stove or leaning against the counter, turning our narrow hallway of a house into something that feels briefly full. It’s the only place where the house feels intentionally occupied, rather than just passed through.

If the air smells like fresh dill and tuna, it’s probably Kaiya, carefully mixing her tuna salad and leaving out little bits of tuna for my cat, Tokyo, in an effort to win her over. Piper Cheney / Daily Nexus

Five months into living at “Tiny,” it’s easy to tell who’s home based on which smell wafts from the kitchen into the rest of the house. If the air smells like fresh dill and tuna, it’s probably Kaiya, carefully mixing her tuna salad and leaving out little bits of tuna for my cat, Tokyo, in an effort to win her over. When the house fills with garlic and onion, it’s usually Erin at the stove, preparing a savory dish like shakshuka or shepherd’s pie. Over the school year, these smells have become less about food and more about reassurance; the comfort of knowing someone else is home.

Most of the time, we’re just making food for ourselves, squeezing past one another in the kitchen and negotiating counter space as we go. But even then, the act of cooking becomes communal. Someone tastes a sauce, someone else asks how long until the airfryer is free, someone joins the Spotify Jam that’s consistently playing in the kitchen. In a house where schedules rarely align, the kitchen becomes the place where we overlap, not because we have to, but because food quietly pulls us together.

In “Tiny,” food becomes a kind of language. It doesn’t ask anyone to sit down or stay, and it doesn’t require conversation. Cooking is simply defined as the comfort of having a friend home, of filling the house with something warm and intentional. In a space where privacy is scarce and time is limited, food offers the steady presence of someone tending a pan on the stove.

A version of this article appeared on p. __ of the Feb. 12, 2026 edition of the Daily Nexus.