Dining at Yale

As the board part of my room & board at Yale, I was given a fist full of pink dining cards entitling me to free meals at any of the dining halls. Considering my financial situation and excitement for the novel experience of dining hall hoping at an Ivy League School, I felt obligated to use them.

Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner, I joined the legions of dining hallies. Not much went down at these dining halls – no food fights, Heimlich maneuvers, or turkey carving stations manned by grizzly men in toques. Most of them were just glorified institutional banquet halls with the occasional bit of excitement when some poor soul drops their tray. The other 99.9% of the time the hall was filled with sounds of clanking dishes, silverware hitting plastic trays and that slow hum of fifty or so people talking at once. Then there is that smell. Thirty completely different food scents competing in your sniffer at once. And after all that pushing and shoving, none win and it all ends up smelling the same, like every cafeteria and buffet across America – from Ponderosa to Caesar’s Palace Grand Buffet. I wonder if you could chemically reproduce that smell and make a cafeteria flavored Jello. How would Bill Cosby sell that?

I remember my dining hall experiences at Indiana University. Every night after dinner, I would make myself a cone of frozen yogurt and I would carry it back to the dorm’s common room without eating any of it. Then I would throw it in the drawer of the computer desk. At just about the two-month mark, millions of fruit flies swarmed the area. It was absolutely horrific and I couldn’t even stand it. Most of them took a liking to the computer monitors in the dorm and you had to brush them off the monitor as you typed. Someone ratted me out I was moved to another dorm complex.

I wanted action! So I took it upon myself to interview some of the Yalies about their eating habits. While at the main dining hall, which is almost identical to the one featured in Harry Potter (minus the special effects), I stumbled across a fella who ate only salad for every meal. Another young man found the self-serve hyper-colored drinks irresistible and loaded his tray with a blue sports drink that had the color of plutonium under a black light, a VERY yellow version of lemonade, and a safety-orange beverage made of “carrots, mangos, and oranges.” I asked him why he was so attracted to this particular combination of drinks, but he had no reply.

Still not finding the level of amusement I expected, I developed my own sort-of idiosyncratic taste for adventure. Every morning I made a Yale signature waffle. Most the time I didn’t even eat it, I just knew it was there… like a good friend who doesn’t talk.