The opportunity to get free food as a college student is something that a lot of people would jump at. 

For the University of South Carolina, Tom and Rachel Sullivan, authors of the New York Times best-selling cookbook “Meals She Eats,” made that possible. 

A cookbook was the last thing that Rachel ever thought she would write as a creative writing major, but here they are. 

“I’ve always wanted to write a book,” she said. “Did I think it was going to be a cookbook? No, I thought it would have been a nonfiction novel or a memoir. So that was a fun little turn of fate.”

The Sullivans’ meal fed more than 200 students at Twelve Oak Estate in Lexington. The USC-student-driven stop was one of four “Meals they Eat” events at different South Atlantic colleges, sponsored by WhatsApp. Students were able to RSVP to get a free meal.  

So far, the Sullivans have cooked a different meal at each school.

“Whether it’s around the season, whether it’s around someone we’re partnering with,” Rachel Sullivan said. “… I feel like it just comes naturally.”

The Sullivan family, with a following of 2.5 million followers on TikTok, won the hearts of many by creating polycystic ovary syndrome-friendly meals that they shared online during Rachel’s two pregnancies. 

“Me being into cooking and both of us kind of deep-diving into anything we get into, we started looking at, like, how food can help nourish her,” Tom said.

Their rise to fame was a long process, but Rachel was determined. 

“I always laugh watching it, and I feel like there’s a lot of people in our space that have the same story,” Tom said of Rachel’s eight years of posting.

The Sullivans started to host college students during the pandemic, when college dorms and cafeterias were all shut down. 

They “adopted” one of their family friends who was in college at the time, and started making him an extra plate. They documented what they made, which led to other students asking if they could also get free food from them. 

“That’s where me and Tom are like, well, if we have the means to do it, we’ll try,” Rachel said. “And we opened up our doors. It started small, you know – only a handful of students and, like, I just documented the journey as it continued to grow.”

Social media is hard to come by. But stealing the hearts of millions comes with a good payoff. Theirs was a cookbook.

“We just had someone reach out on the internet when we were doing a story one day, and they said, ‘Would you ever write a cookbook?’” Rachel said. “And we said, ‘Well, yeah, if anyone knows somebody in the industry.’ And then the next day, … the biggest publisher in the world was like, hey, you want to write a book?”

Rachel said it has always been her dream to work on a movie set. But she said she never expected her life to turn out like this. 

“Now my life’s kind of like its own little movie that I get to make many episodes about every day,” Rachel said. “So it’s fun. I think we’ve both always had big dreams. And it’s cool to see how they’ve, like, come to fruition in different ways through social media.”