Eating & Education

Generally, all men have stories from their younger days about the consumption of huge amounts of food, often involving hapless aunts and mothers, but the true eating story is one that has its roots in a hostel mess or dining hall. Anyone can eat copious amounts of home-cooked food. Doing something one likes is not exactly a task - if humans on the whole liked cleaning shit and wrestling with lions, we would have had the Twelve Cakewalks of Hercules instead of the Twelve Labours. Eating staggering amounts of food in a hostel is special for one particular reason: the food served there inhabited the area just onside of being edible with a hint of recognition thrown in - it looked familiar, but you couldn't quite put your finger on what it was. 

I remember when I was in the hostel, a roommate's elder brother, who was three years' our senior, held the eating record for the hostel. He had managed to consume, in one sitting, 25 of the hostel's chapatis. My roommate was possibly more proud of the record than his brother who had set it was. This record also became his goal to beat, something he managed to do a couple of years later, when he was a year younger than his brother and took the record up by a whole two points to 27. Mind you, having eaten that same food for five years, I appreciate how big those two additional points were. Anyway, he called his brother that evening to give him the good news. The record was in the family and pushed a bit further out of the reach of wannabe eaters.

I guess his brother was proud of him as well. I remember, the juniors in school were. They used to look up to him with awe, especially the newer ones who had yet to reconcile themselves to the food served in the hostel. More than once I heard snatches of conversations:

"Can you believe it! 27 of these...no wonder this place toughens you up..."


In college I was a part of a small group of like minded value-for-money eaters who went together to eating places, ate without care, above their weight class and did not sully the activity by taking petty bets - once in a while, yes, but not always and not with the members of the group. Since money had to go the furthest distance possible, we had a list of eating places corresponding to the funds at hand.
I can remember quite a few nights spent sleeping out on the institute lawns since it was physically impossible to climb the three flights of stairs that would take me to my room. People often thought that we were passed out drunk in the lawn. It wasn't the drink, it was the food. Eating copious amounts of food gives you a food coma: limbs don't function, vision becomes blurry, when people speak to you, you feel as if they are speaking from a place far-far away, movement becomes impossible or nearly so. All you can do is to sleep it off. I remember once a member of the eating crew, upon finishing the repast made the mistake of getting up immediately afterwards. He swooned and fell back onto his seat. We had a very anxious restaurant owner hovering about us asking if all was well. It was. We told him, the eating was good and that this 'fainting' was positive proof that the food was good. He smiled tentatively in the manner of a restaurateur who is unsure whether people fainting in his restaurant after overeating is good for business or not.

This was recreational eating. Serious eating was carried out in the confines of the dining hall. People took pride in the food served in their institutes. The idea was for the food to be as close as possible to the fine line that separates things that are edible from things that are not. The closer the fare served to this line, the more pride folks would have in it. Sample quotes from graduates of some well known schools in India:

"We used to get different pastel coloured food everyday. It tasted the same, exactly the same every day for four years."

"Our mess used to post the menu each day on the notice board. We asked them to post it after meals. We'd then take bets from everyone on what they ate."

"The adopted stray dog refused to eat the mutton."

"We once used a puri as a frisbee. It was smaller, but stung when you caught a fast one."

"We used to get greens every time the grass in the football field got mowed. I started tracking it in my second year of college. After a year, it had a correlation of one."

The key thing to note here is that all this was said with a reasonable amount of pride. Eating that stuff for a few years was supposed to get you ready for anything that life could throw at you. It was a reflection of the person you could be, how you could weather the storms of adversity. It was a reflection of the school you went to, how it readied you for life, how it would not waste time and effort on niceties like food and concentrate on getting you a true education. That a large percentage of students cut classes like crazy didn't matter. Putting up with that food alone would ensure you got a great education.

This brings us to the nub of the matter: Most people who have spent time in hostels (at least in India) seem to believe that there exists an inverse relationship between the quality of food served in the mess to the quality of education provided in the classroom.


You must have heard the old saying especially if you have read Asterix the Legionary "The stronger the army the worse the food. That's what keeps the men in a nasty mood."
Eating lots and lots of hostel food, that, as time goes by becomes worse and worse in our memories (Both quantity and quality appreciate and depreciate respectively with the passage of time) was considered a badge of courage, to be worn with pride and honour. Everyone of course wants to be perceived as 'strong' and food is what wins it for them - it needs to be consumed frequently, multiple times a day in fact, it is essential to one's survival - what better baptism by fire could one get?

Next time you are choosing a school, just eat at the mess. You'll know how good an education you would get.