This summer I went to The Gambia, an extremely small African country surrounded almost completely by Senegal, for two months at an medical research council camp where my godmother worked as a malaria research scientist. While I did have an amazing time, the food was frequently an issue.
Though the local food wasn’t bad, it didn’t always agree with me. Classic meals were domoda, a stew made with either fried chicken, goat, or fish with stewed vegetables. At the end the entire thing is bathed in a spicy peanut sauce. Or there was Yassa, chicken and vegetables marinated in a spicy, oily sauce. My favorite Gambian dish was benachin, which was rice fried with vegetables.
All these dishes were very heavy and very greasy, and more often than not made me feel slightly ill. The only available dairy product was milk—and even that was so pasteurized it didn’t have to be refrigerated. It was warm and tasted of chemicals. You had to wash and peel all the produce you ate, but it was still very possible to get sick. The only (non-Gambian) meat we could eat was boiled chicken, which tasted and looked suspiciously of rubber.
For breakfast I usually had black coffee—which was weak and watery, as the only option was instant coffee brought from the US, and I had it black because ultra-pasteurized milk is what I imagine baby formula to taste like. Then I might have a mango or banana, the most common fruits there. For the first few weeks I didn’t mind at all—mangoes and bananas aren’t bad. But after sixty days of fruit that gave me dysentery about a third of the time, I was beginning to dream about a blueberry muffin, a bowl of pineapple and melon, and a cup of coffee—my usual breakfast at Groton.
I missed the Dining Hall. No—‘missed’ is too weak a word. I dreamed of the Dining Hall. I wanted their grilled chicken breast. I craved their caesar salad. I would wake up every morning and try to make a deal with some higher power that if I just had one cup of coffee that tasted like the coffee I relied on during exam week, I would eat everything else put in front of me. It went on like this for two months.
At Groton, we are tremendously lucky to have such a wonderful Dining Hall that is staffed with incredibly talented, hard-working, and kind people. At a place like Groton, where we are constantly putting our bodies and minds under stress, we need to make sure we are fueling ourselves properly. Every single day, the Dining Hall makes sure that we have lots of healthy food which allows each of us to perform to our full potential, both inside the classroom and out. And that is not always a simple task: Groton has 380 students and 93 faculty, excluding the staff members who also eat at Groton. That’s 473 mouths to feed—seven days a week. To prepare food of any type on that scale is very difficult; it takes much more work than many students realize. It also is just as much work cleaning up after 500 people. But the Dining Hall staff do it every single day.
Yet I still hear students complaining about the food we are given, and admit to occasionally being one of those students. I’ve complained that we have over-complicated desserts, too much pork, and not enough grilled cheese. But most of the time the desserts are delicious, and when (in my opinion) they aren’t, there is always fruit. And while I don’t like pork, most people do, and there is chicken and turkey at the sandwich station, and chicken at the salad bar. Furthermore, if I want grilled cheese more frequently, the sandwich station has bread, many different types of cheese, and panini presses. The options are there; I’m just a bit of a whiner with a lazy streak. We are incredibly lucky to have such an amazing Dining Hall. It took me living in the middle of the African bush to realize that, but I will never take the work they do for granted, and you will never hear me complaining about any of the food they prepare again.