Here is my select option
After Playing around a bit I came up with this and it seems to work just splendidly
I may be 100% wrong in leveraging the collect function but it works fine on many of my tests. I want to say thank you to MPS as it was your example that really made me try this as when there is no data in "recommended_food" you will pull an error because in_array requires an array and will not work well with null so I then came up with the idea of doing something like this.
@if (old("options")){{ (in_array($option->id, old("options")) ? "selected":"") }}@endif
inline but man that looks ugly to me so long story short I am using the following instead
{{ (collect(old('options'))->contains($option->id)) ? 'selected':'' }}
Hope this helps others!!