I was a senior in high school when the first years were in eighth grade. This makes me feel old, like I should be in a jar of formaldehyde somewhere. I see them walking in packs to O-Hill, full of optimism, and I feel I should warn them. As a first year, I vowed never to become a stereotypical, pretentious Wahoo. Yet I nearly lost my soul at the University, and it all began with the dining hall.
I, too, initially thought the University's food was good. Three straight months of it convinced me otherwise, and I joined a small but fervent group of conspiracy theorists: The dining hall was putting out the "good stuff" early in the year. They hooked us on things like chicken parmesan, and then slowly it stopped appearing. They changed their brand of chicken nuggets thinking we wouldn't notice. Things got worse.
We were in the middle of a drought, and to save dishwashing water they banned trays and gave us plastic forks and Styrofoam cups. Imagine trying to balance several hot plates on your bare arm, or trying to cut a Salisbury steak with a plastic knife. It was an impossible task, a cruel practical joke that we suspected was really an elaborate psychology experiment. Unable to cut our food, we ate less and less. The squeak of Styrofoam cups and the sound of snapping plastic utensils haunted my dreams. It was a dark time, filled with ominous signs and much suffering.
And so began the "Starving Time," nearly four centuries after the one at Jamestown but no less severe. We all felt the tension. I saw a dining hall server go off in a tirade on a girl complaining about her omelet, complete with cursing and the throwing of his sacred plastic gloves.
I traveled to JMU to see my brother. The rumors were true -- the food was amazing. Their dining room was the Land of Milk and Honey. How was this possible? JMU is a state school, too. Surely this was the inequality politicians claimed to be fighting. I decided to write a letter to the governor every single day until I had justice, even if it took years. I got the idea from "The Shawshank Redemption," but halfway through the first letter I couldn't spell the word "heinous" and stopped writing. I meant to look it up, but I never got around to it, and my letter-writing campaign was derailed before it started. Like many of my classmates, I gave up on the dining hall.
But we survived. We ate Campbell's Chunky Soup straight out of the can in our dorm rooms and cursed Donavon McNabb for telling us it was filling. There was thankfully no cannibalism during this Starving Time. I considered it briefly, but my roommate was bony and I knew his mother. You can't eat a person when you know his mother. Ask Miss Manners -- it's one of the first rules.
The Starving Time toughened me and unlocked a primal instinct. Suddenly everything was clear. I needed to combine meat and fire. I bought a grill and used it nearly every night, even though it was illegal at my apartment. When I received several notes from my apartment manager citing my fire code violations, I crumpled them up and used them to help light the charcoal. I flipped my steaks with my bare hand because I wanted to commune with the beef. The grill and I were soul mates, and I didn't care that some people thought it was weird that I carried pictures of it in my wallet.
I was willing to eat anything. I ate Slim Jims daily and wasn't put off when I bit into hard bits of bone, tendon, asbestos -- really we'll never know. I even ate hot dogs at 7-11. I knew my diet would one day give me some combination of cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. I accepted it like a gladiator who knows he will die in the arena.
Then last summer, I stored my grill under a tarp. Water got in and it rusted terribly. I felt like my dog had an inoperable tumor. I had to put her down. I brought her to the end of my driveway, trying not to think how the garbage man would toss her carcass irreverently into the back of the truck.
In my depression I started eating prissy sandwiches at Panera, the same sandwiches I had long denounced as effeminate. Wendy's dried-out fries at 2 a.m. were no longer good enough for me. I began drinking $30 bottles of Italian wine and saying things like, "The Portobello mushrooms really bring out the saltiness of the goat cheese and prosciutto." I was everything the Hokies hate about Wahoos, a pretentious caricature of my former self. The University had finally broken me.
One afternoon, as I bathed in Perrier, I realized I lost my way. I needed to get back to the student who had survived the Starving Time, who ate anything, who had no ounce of pretense. I rushed to 7-11 and bought a Big Bite hot dog -- the kind that sit on those rolling hot-wheel devices for weeks, maybe years. The cashier dusted off the dog and handed it to me in a bun that had either a spot of flour on it or mold. I hoped it was mold. I needed atonement for my sins, penance for my long absence. The cashier smiled as I loaded it with chili that looked like something served on "Fear Factor." But there was no $50,000 prize. This was about more than that.
Nick Cady is a fourth-year College student.
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