Every student at some point or another finds themselves sprinting from class to class with a grumbling stomach. And as many mothers would suggest, the solution is very simple, “just eat your damn lunch!” But for those that forgot to pack a lunch, Sackville, New Brunswick has other designs for its residents’ food shaped needs. When on campus the only shapes a proper meal comes in are sandwich shaped. Gracie’s has so-called soups and wraps, but really those are just diversity hires used to buff out the menu.
Once students resign themselves to the bland bread and drab meats—or worse, the egg salad sandwich that the Biochemistry Society suspects may have achieved sentients—they will have to line up nearly out the door of the library so they do not pass out from hunger in their three hour lab that bans food from the room.
Worse are those professors that insist on using food in every metaphor and question. Somehow they are always the ones with the hour and a half class at the end of the day, where students that were not fast enough to pick up some bland calories at the Flying Bean must sit in studious misery. They are the ones swaying back and forth from their blood sugar crash, the entire time tasting the sweet jelly-filled Timbits that their econ professor is using to describe opportunity cost. The only opportunity the hungry students are looking for is the opportunity to run home and finally sate their hunger.
Students with a laid back schedule get a buffet of options in the downtown core of Sackville. Everything from the pizza at Goyas, to the pizza at Fener’s, and even the pizza at Joey’s. Oh, wait. That’s ash. No wonder Song’s Chopsticks and Oh Chicken are doing so well. Robot servers aside, having a little variety is delicious.
At least the students in residence that pay an arm and a leg for meal hall get a little variety in their meals, plus it is right on campus. Though the choice of pickle bacon pizza is a culinary curiosity best left for those with damaged taste buds, but at least it is some sort of variety. On the other hand, many meals are spiced to the taste of a monotone robot, one that calls black pepper the spiciest thing known to humankind. Making meal hall work wonderfully for the white student body—at least, any students that are not vegetarian, vegan, gluten free, or have any allergies. In which case, good luck staying above the hunger line.
There is nothing more primal than hunting for food, and in many ways Mt. A proves a more difficult hunting ground than the Serengeti, especially when the sun goes down and campus turns into a straight up food desert. Feeling like our ancestors of old, prowling the night in the search for any morsels or scraps. Finding themselves looking in at Gracie’s fat fryers and salivating at the possibilities. Wondering if lock picking is as easy as it looks like in Skyrim.
When wandering the midnight food desert of Sackville there is one thing that crosses every student’s mind: how hard is it to kill, skin, and cook a deer? Then as reality sets in, the question becomes how hard is it to pluck and cook a duck? Because those ducks are trustworthy as hell, as long as there is bread in it for them. But before any students go out clubbing ducks for food I suggest they walk the two blocks it will take to get home and scrounge up dinner from their empty fridge. We are students after all, having no food in the house is a law of physics. As immutable as gravity. And unfortunately if you live in Sackville and go wanting for food at midnight, those laws dictate that you go hungry.
