Finding your people by bonding over bad food.
FINDING YOUR PEOPLE BY BONDING OVER BAD FOOD.
Follow for more stories from the heart of campus life.
Remember those early days? The dazzling brochures promised intellectual feasts, but sometimes, dinner was just… a mystery. You'd walk into the dining hall, eyes scanning for something recognizable, and then share a knowing glance with a stranger across the room. That shared, unspoken understanding – "Oh, *this* again?" – was often the first spark of connection.
It wasn't the gourmet meals that built the deepest bonds. It was the collective groans over the weekly 'unidentified casserole,' the elaborate theories about what the 'chicken' truly was, or the desperate midnight snack runs after a particularly disappointing dinner. These moments of shared culinary bewilderment transcended majors, backgrounds, and dorm assignments. Suddenly, the future titans of industry and groundbreaking researchers were just a group of hungry students, united by their mutual struggle against questionable mashed potatoes.
We learned to laugh. We found humor in the bland, the burnt, and the bizarre. Those initial, tentative conversations, born from a shared eye-roll or a whispered critique, blossomed into friendships that lasted far beyond graduation. The cafeteria, with all its culinary quirks and sometimes outright failures, became an unexpected incubator for genuine connection. It was where we shed our academic personas and simply became ourselves, finding common ground not in our achievements, but in our shared human experience of needing to eat, and occasionally, needing to commiserate. That's where you found your people.