Food isn't the problem. Water/heat is. Ants are looking for water. Traditional sprays don't work well, because it just kills the ones you see and not the colony, they just move and go through another crack in the home.
Just the ant baits you get in traps and leave them around the ants. Let the ants walk in and out for the traps for about a week. They gradually get worse and then they start to go away after about a week. If you're afraid of the ant problem spreading, get your favorite hand-dishwashing soap and draw a "barrier" liberally with the undiluted detergent so that the ants can't cross-over to another location without going through the detergent. Most ants are smart enough to not cross into the detergent, and the ones that aren't will be quickly eliminated by darwin's theory of evolution. I did this regularly my bay area home which has a huge ant problem regularly, since it's pretty hot there in the summer, and some of these older homes there have a 18inch crawl space underneath the house floor, which exposes lots of cracks etc.
Since I'm assuming this is a rental, don't do anything else after the ants go away. Otherwise, if it were your home, after the ant problems go away, I'd use some caulking to plug up the cracks where the ants were coming from.
Here in SD, I had an ant problem in CV when we first moved in. But we hired an exterminator that sprays the outside every two years, and we don't have a problem since.
