It is one of those childhood rites-of-passage that never happened to me. I never saw one, never participated in one. I feel cheated now that I’m older.
I grew up in a wimpy upper-middle-class white-bread town (Littleton, CO) where the most trouble I ever got in was disobeying a violin teacher in 8th grade. Bitch.
But boy, wouldn’t it have been great to actually have picked up a whole lunch room platter and in Belushi-esque fashion screamed “FOOD FIGHT!!!” while plastering people with mashed potatoes and Turkey bits?
Not in the school cafeteria, but I work at a restaraunt. Occaisonally you’ll notice one of the servers or cooks plastered with whipped cream. It’s happend to me a couple times, and I’ve done my share of plastering. That’s about it though.
I remember a big food fight one morning in the dining hall at boarding school.
There were always one or two teachers on duty to supervise breakfast and the clean-up afterwards, but this morning the duty teacher was running late. Our boarding house was on duty, and one of the fellow year 12’s in my house noticed that our tutor was running late for duty. He picked up a piece of toast from a big stack on our table, and frisbeed it up high into the air.
The dining hall was one of those big old-style ones. The roof was the equivalent of two stories high and the long tables were all lined up so that everyone could see the piece of toast drift through the air, spinning as though it were in slow-motion.
About 5-10 seconds passed. Then another piece of toast went up in the air. Soon there was toast flying everywhere. People were running into the servery to grab more food to throw. I saw a girl get hit in the head with a half-eaten banana at a range of 20 metres. Breakfast that morning had been grilled tomatoes, so they were getting thrown everywhere. The servery doors were shut and locked by the catering staff, but the fight continued. 300-400 students were going berserk throwing every solid in sight around the dining hall.
About two minutes later and a short, grey-haired member of the catering staff came out from the servery. She yelled at the top of her lungs, and the food-fight subsided. The duty teacher had been rung on his mobile, and he soon showed up, very redfaced. Luckily I wasn’t rostered on clean-up duty that week.
Noone got badly hurt, and it wasn’t too messy. The only things I saw get thrown were of the solid projectile variety, with the messiest things being toast with jam on it, and half-eaten fruit.
Anyway, later that day a special all-school assembly was called about the food fight, appealing for anyone who might know who started it. To my knowledge, the guy who started it never got caught. Sure, it was an immature thing for 16-18 year olds to do, but it was spectacular to watch!!
But the one I remember most was “The Great Bean Fight Of Mr. Brown’s Room”. Fourth grade, pinto beans and plastic spoons to launch them like catapults. Confined to the room because of rain, terror reigned until Mr. Brown returned and caught us in the act. All those sniveling girls ratted us off and DT and the boys got a trip to the office for swats. (A regular event)
Hmm. I’ve been involved in a waterfight, in the dishroom near the end of the year. That was fun. I was also involved in a “food fight” – a mock testing to show camp counselers how do deal with developmentally disabled campers – alas, I was not a camper in that exercise.
We sucked at it, btw. But we had plenty of the ‘real thing’ to learn off of.
My highschool was the oldest in town (the very first highschool in the area in its original building). The cafeteria was on the first floor, sort-of-basement. The first floor had very deep window wells, so the classrooms did get almost as much natural light as the ground level floors and above.
The cafeteria however, was in the center of the building. So no windows at all. As the building was in the old, heritage part of town, and was a very old building itself, during “inclement weather” there was the occasional power outtage.
So one lunch hour, the cafetiera was packed and suddenly the lights went out leaving us in near pitch black darkness (the emergency lights had come on in the hall but not the cafeteria). There was a sudden hush of shock and awe as we were surprised by the sudden darkness.
Then a little voice in the blackness chirpped quietly: “Food fight.”
But the little squeak, in such a silent room may as well have been the call to arms of a bugle! Hands groped the tables everywhere! If your hands felt something squishy you grabbed it and threw it wherever your heard a sound betray a target.
It was a total free for all! The melee probably only lasted about two very messy minutes.
I heard my classmate squeal and just then the lights came on revealing a slab of baloney stuck to the side of her face with mustard.
No one got in trouble because it was utterly impossible to know who’s whispered “food fight” and impossible to tell who had been a “thrower” and who had been a “throwee” (everyone was splattered with stuff).
The cleaning staff looked particularly annoyed, but the teachers and administration just rolled their eyes and vowed to get the emergency lights fixed.
