Dining in Strachan Hall
My mum used to collect vegetables tossed in the dumpster of a wholesale produce warehouse near our home. I also used to go to my sister’s workplace, a flower shop in Toronto’s financial district, and collect the carcasses of chickens in a large black plastic bag from an adjacent fried chicken takeaway shop to cook at home. These were done for practical reasons, rather than necessity, but they coincided with the worst of my family’s financial hardship back in the 1990s.
The vegetables that my mum collected were fine to consume. If they were leafy greens, such as cabbage, we would just peel off the top rotten layers. Else we would simply chop off the bad parts. Likewise, the chicken carcasses were freshly cut and of good quality. There was still plenty of meat on them. My sister knew the butcher at the chicken shop, and they would otherwise be tossed out.
In my first year at Trinity College (University of Toronto), I used to “sneak” into the posh resident dining hall (where students were required to wear a black academic gown to dine and meals were served by waitstaff). I was a non-resident at Trinity and non-res students were given a handful of meal vouchers. Most non-res students used them for lunches at the College cafeteria. But I bought a gown and used mine at the canteen as well as at the tony dining hall for dinners. I wanted to experience the old-world charm of Trinity. Besides, I lived on my own next to campus and would otherwise have basic meals back at my place.
It was rare for non-res to show up at Strachan Hall for the fancy dinners, so the tallywhacker (person in charge of entry to the dining hall) must have forgotten that I was not a resident and stopped collecting my meal ticket after he saw me there several times. I felt out of place there as everyone lived at the College and knew each other. Additionally, I stuck out with my ponytail and unpolished mannerisms.
It was a bit awkward when one night the tallywhacker finally realised that I was a non-res and I was confronted about my presence at dinner. Luckily, I had one remaining ticket on me that I had been “using” for the past dozen meals or so.
The toughest part about these experiences was not the food insecurity or quality. Rather it was the shame and embarrassment. Sometimes people would come to my family’s house and see a big pile of half-rotten vegetables in the kitchen, and I wouldn’t know what to tell them. And I never dined again in Strachan Hall after I used my last meal voucher, even in subsequent years at Trinity. It was hard to be self-confident or take the world by storm given the circumstances.
(When I served as an assistant master at one of Princeton’s residential colleges several years later, I made sure to sit with students if I saw them involuntarily eating alone in the dining hall.)
I worked at a supermarket the year when I used to frequent Strachan Hall. There was once an incident where a few of my erstwhile co-workers made a joke behind my back about Chinese Canadians buying goods from the damaged-and-expired shelf.
My family did not use food banks or availed of charities. We just toughed it out. Adversity is often hidden in plain sight.
