A Better Food Pyramid

If you ask any ALA student what they think is the biggest problem on this campus is, they’ll give you one of two answers. Some of the ones who don’t own laptops would say it’s that they don’t have a laptop. But the vast majority of them would answer that it’s the meals.

But I am not here to whine; although the food could be more varied, it could also be much worse. For one, it could be what about a third of the students here seem to desire, which is a diet based almost entirely on steak and burgers. Nor do I care about the much hated “Vegetarian Mondays”, partially because I’m a rabbit and love vegetables, and partially because meat is terrible for the earth - its production is responsible for 18% of global greenhouse emissions.

My treehugging aside, it’s important to realize there are some unavoidable realities to a boarding school diet. To describe what the typical ALA student eats, I have drawn a food pyramid. For those of you who have never seen one before, this is a standard one that all British schoolchildren see at one point or another:

The idea is that you eat more of the stuff at the bottom of the pyramid, because it’s good for you. Yes, I am well aware that “Wilderbeast” is spelt “Wildebeast”; I didn’t want to do the whole drawing again.

Now for ALA’s! (It’s largely based on my own experience, but I think it holds true for the broader community in many cases):

1. Bread. ALA has seven core values: Integrity, Curiosity, Excellence, Diversity, Humility, Compassion, and Bread. Bread is an absolutely essential part of any ALA student’s routine; it is the air we breathe in between meals. Dimeji told me that he didn’t like bread last week, and I was so overcome with a sympathy that I almost fell to my knees. Life would have been easier for him if were born a vampire and couldn’t go in the sunlight.

I’ve already mentioned our “PB&J, All, Every Day” motto, but there is a dark side to our bread-heavy diet: addiction. Snack time has conditioned me to want a cheese sandwich every day at the 9 o’clock p.m. Nothing gives me greater pleasure than seeing a two small triangles of low quality white bread with grated cheddar and butter in between them. They put out chicken salad sandwiches instead of the usual cheese the other day, and Akan (a fellow addict) and I were on the verge of tears.

2. Chicken. I don’t really like red meat, so I always take the chicken option at both lunch and dinner. Chicken here comes in all shapes and sizes: drumsticks, medium sizes chunks with sauce, filets, drumsticks, small chunks, and drumsticks. It’s also useful as artillery ammo; Madia likes to fling the bones at Mohamadou.

3. Chutney, Ketchup, and Salt. No ALA student worth his salt (ha) goes a day without adding flavors his meal. House favorites include: chicken with chutney, rice with ketchup, and anything with salt. Adventurous individuals add pepper, but it’s not necessary. As a rule, you eat about as much ketchup as you do meat.

4. Chicken Triple Decker. Lets be honest, you cannot live off a diet of bread, cheese and chicken. You need to melt the cheese, add barbeque sauce, sour cream, ricotta and tomato sauce, chop the chicken up, put it all onto three calorific pizzas, all layered on top of each other. Now THAT’S a diet. Thank God for Debonairs Pizza and all that it has done for my body mass index.

5. Vegetables. Vegetables are good for you.

6. Lays. Lays are provided at snack time and also sold at the tuck shop, which is why we eat more of them than any other junk food. As a side note, the crisps here have a much stronger kick than in the US; cheese and onion genuinely tastes like raw onions, and I feel like I’m drinking acid whenever I eat salt and vinegar.

7. Apples with Peanut Butter. Africans love to take bits of Western culture, from hip-hop to high tops, but this snack could be America’s greatest contribution yet. If you haven’t tried it, it’s not disgusting. In fact, the gap years have a 100% success rate with converts so far. Apples with peanut butter are also a brilliant use of limited culinary resources; few people would think to put sandwich spreads on fruit. But most importantly, they are scrumptious. Don’t be shy and give them a try!

8. Bovril/Marmite. These two condiments are on the food pyramid, but only so I can say that I see no reason for them to be on our dining room tables. Bovril is basically beef extract tar, and marmite is mildew jam. If you ask me, both of them smell and taste awful. Bovril used to be put in hot water and drunk as “beef tea” in the trenches during WWI, but I think the threat of being machine-gunned gave the soldiers an exaggerated appreciation for it. At ALA, nobody eats the bloody Bovril. The Bovril jars sit on the table, sullen, lonely, and as untouched as Mr. O's hoodie drawer.