At my college the movie night selection was “Tom Jones.” There’s a scene where our hero and a woman are eating chicken – very lasciviously. They licked and kissed and mouthed the meat in ways that suggested what they might do to each other’s private bits afterwards. The cafeteria staff thought it would be brilliant to serve fried chicken that night in homage to the film. It was a clever idea, but since dinner preceded the movie hardly any of the students caught on to the intended meaning. What could have been a mass display of sexual innuendo ended up being a classic food fight, with chicken pieces flying everywhere for quite a while. It was only after seeing the movie that most of us realized the different kind of fun we might have had.
While wasting food isn’t the most noble thing to do, it’s not at the root of people going without. There’s no shortage of food (there are excesses), the problem lies in how to distribute it to the hungry.
The OP asked if I’d been in a food fight and I answered. I refuse to be chastised by the likes of you for something I did as a teenager in 1976.
My fraternity used to have them once a year or so for some occasion I can’t remember. My policy was to eat as quickly as possible before the food started flying, then beat an immediate and hasty retreat. Since I certainly didn’t want to be on the cleanup crew.
Same here. I’ve seen plenty of real fist fights in the classroom hallways, but a food fight? Not that I could think of. I guess we preferred pummeling each other with fists and at least eating our lunch rather than throwing it around. It never did seem like a lot of fun to me, but I’ve never been or seen one, so I guess I don’t know.
This is my experience, too. Maybe I’ve seen someone throw a roll across the table, and in college, it used to be a game to flick butter pats and try to get them to stick to the ceiling, but that’s about it. Never anything with significant quantities of food or mess.
Yeah, food is a very emotional thing. I, personally, find it hard to throw food away. So I leave it in the fridge until is isn’t food any more. And I’ll do that KNOWING that we aren’t going to eat it. But I just find it hard to throw it away while it’s still edible.
Obviously, the amount of food wasted in food fights is insignificant, and has nothing to do with food shortages (which are pretty much all about getting food to the right places, not about actually having enough total food in the US, or even in the world.) But I get how it would bother you.
If it makes you feel better, when people at the table threw rolls at each other, they ate the rolls after they stopped throwing them. I mean, it was just a roll that bounced off your shirt, why not eat it?
While I’ve used food for sporting or entertainment purposes in my life, it was never in a “scrum” context. Using an apple or orange as a ball, or hurling or mashing pumpkins or watermelons to see them go splat, that kind of thing; not throwing food or drink at another person with the intention of getting it on them, at least not for reasons of fun (I have thrown a drink in someone’s face, but with the explicit intention of daring them to escalate further to a fistfight).
I can’t remember any food fights at school.
Maybe a roll or orange got thrown. That’s about it.
Nothing all that memorable.
I don’t think there were any food fights at the school I went to. I do remember me and my sister using spoons as catapults with mashed potatoes as ammo a time or two at the kitchen table when my mom wasn’t looking, possibly with a pea or five stuffed inside.
My son tells me that there are occasional food fights in middle school, but I haven’t gotten a note home about it, so I can only assume he’s not participating (or just hasn’t been caught).
Several, in grade school and middle school. The quality of the food served was more fit for flinging than eating, so we flung, often. 
Bolding mine.
An aunt of mine was a teacher of first graders in a parochial school. She said their favorite stories were the ten plagues of Egypt, due to the grossness.
I taight second and thrid grade Sunday School. Our church has a series of woindows of the first twelve disciples. I would show them to the kids and explain the symbols, as Peter with and upside down cross. Bartholemew with a flaying knife, and so on. By thei third one they’d be asking “ooo, how did thid one die?”
Yeah, I don’t think it’s “wasting food” if it’s mystery meat and overcooked slimy veggies which are all going to wind up in the trash cans at the end of the meal.
I think most food fights are a kind of spontaneous eruption and at the end most of the participants are surprised at what they have done. But fun, in an odd way. At least that was my experience. And, you know, cafeteria food.
Our middle school cafeteria was in the middle of the building and had no windows. It also doubled as the auditorium. Our very stern AP would stand on stage with a microphone and call out bad behavior by name as she saw it. She was constantly hollering at people for minor infractions like dropping their silverware or people throwing away partially eaten lunches.
One day the power went out and it was a good thirty seconds before the standby generator got some lights on. During that time just about everyone in the cafeteria had hurled their lunches and drinks in her direction. I still remember the horrified look on her face when the lights came back on - she was covered in milk, juice, spaghetti, you name it. The entire school was on silent lunch detention for two weeks after that.
Orange smiles were commonly served in my middle school cafeteria and are very aerodynamic. A couple of us 6th graders were tossing stuff around and he 8th graders on the other side decided to teach us a lesson and let us have it. We returned fire.
No.
What the hell !?!?!?!?
Once in junior high. The cafeteria was one of the gyms, and was in the middle of the building. No external walls=no windows. The power went out, and the vice principal, the guy in charge of discipline, walked into the room with a flash light. It was kind of a precursor to the internet. Anonymous actions with no threat of being identified.
Not me. The idea wouldn’t have even crossed my mind. It always seemed like one of those tropes on TV that didn’t reflect real life.
Thinking about it now, I can’t imagine that it wouldn’t have been stopped pretty quickly, as you don’t let kids go unsupervised like they show on TV, and the adults are not nearly so powerless. They also usually didn’t have the resource cop who would eat lunch with us. Nor did TV show the poor kids for whom the free lunch was an important part of their meal.
I did, however, once throw a milk carton at a girl who kept treating everyone like garbage. Everyone stared at me like I was Satan, and I basically had a panic attack and ran off and hid in the auditorium dressing room. At no point did anyone yell “food fight” and act like it was all a bunch of fun.