Remembering the 2007 Bernotas Middle School Food Fight

A food fight, done right, is a thing of raw, unencumbered chaos. A food fight, done wrong, can be fun or playful or silly, but often falls flat.

In December of 2007, I had the privilege of experiencing raw, unencumbered chaos.

It was right before winter break, and the guys who sat over by the cafeteria bathroom had been trying for weeks to get a food fight off the ground. One had briefly flared up, but they all threw what they had at each other too quickly for it to be sustained, and they didn’t keep throwing it after the initial volley. It was a skirmish, but not a battle. I’m not sure the teachers monitoring lunch even noticed.

Today, though, was going to be different.

Word had been moving around the halls for a couple days. Not too many days—not so many that teachers heard enough to take it seriously—but more than just isolated whispers. We knew, walking into that two-year-old, sparkling clean, recently-added-to-the-school-building-at-the-expense-of-the-taxpayer lunchroom that many were prepared to throw food at one another. I’m changing the names in this story, but Tim is the guy I remember walking out of the lunch line with a tray piled high with all the sides—all the sides normally declined. Others did this too. They took salad. They took apple slices. They took everything offered them, and I have to wonder how the lunch ladies processed this emotionally: Curiosity? Foreboding? Anticipation? Surely, they knew. They had to know. I’m surprised there was enough salad. That school must have been wasting a lot of salad.

Catherine was going around the cafeteria, then, when most of us were seated. I was down the table from Tim, at a table rather centrally located, with a view of the guys who sat by the bathroom and the weird-but-fun-and-generally-well-behaved kids behind me. I was sitting across from Charles, a pale-faced red-haired band friend of mine who would go on to achieve brief cult fame at the end of the year when he dropped acid one weekend then started acting out in class the next week, a spree that culminated in him taking a leak in a recycling bin on his way to the vice principal’s office—an offense for which I don’t think he was ever apprehended. John was down the table from me—John, the friendly, soft-mannered kid with the most athletic ability of anyone in town, and just enough of a competitive/incendiary streak to make him the coolest eighth grader I can imagine. Back in sixth grade, I’d won a fight with John. He and Ryan had been tabletopping me repeatedly over on the lawn at a high school football game, and I eventually responded by tackling John, kneeling on top of him, and giving him a few soft body punches until I got bored. He got me back later that winter by kicking my shins repeatedly under the table in art class, to the point that one started to bleed. I liked John. He was a good guy. I liked Ryan too. I donkey-kicked him in the teeth that night (he tried to set up one last tabletop after I’d sat on John for a bit), but he ended up being a big part of middle school for me.

Catherine stopped by our table, excitedly shout-whispering “five minutes til the food fight!” She extended her outstretched palm our way, in case we needed to count the minutes on her fingers. I have no idea how this didn’t attract the teachers’ attention. No idea whatsoever. My only guess is that eighth grade lunchrooms must be so customarily chaotic, especially on the last day before break, and teachers must be so human like the rest of us that the combination of “I’m just going to hope this goes away” and “I need to make sure nobody’s trying to upper decker the toilet” kept them from digging in too far to Catherine’s scampers.

I had my doubts. A food fight needs a spark. But the spark came, five minutes after Catherine’s scampers, just as she predicted. Brett, a kid who achieved brief high school lunchroom glory a year later by informally bareknuckle boxing the future supporting lead of the high school musical (Hairspray, two years after said boxing—he played Seaweed) in an attempt to defend his older sister’s honor after said future musical star wouldn’t stop telling Brett he thought his sister was hot (it wasn’t a great fight, but Brett did connect once, which led us all to creep over after the deans had taken him and Seaweed away and point excitedly at the half a dozen small flecks of blood on the tile), stood up. Brett, a seriously religious young man who attended the big Evangelical church in town and always seemed at least moderately offended, opened his chocolate milk. Brett, a buzz-cutted, often expressionless thirteen year old with some solid athleticism in his growing frame, let fly.

There was a pause as the chocolate milk soared through the air. Later, amidst the wreckage, we walked over and observed the trail it had left, floor to bench to table to bench to floor to bench and so on, the whole line there on the side of the room by the wall with the bathrooms (Brett, as you may have guessed, was among those who sat by the bathrooms). It was a good toss. Everyone saw it. But would it work?

One of two courses of action follows the attempted ignition of a food fight. In the first, nobody has the balls to do anything, or too few people have the balls to do anything, and the kid in question feels kind of dumb and the kids with chocolate milk on their hoodies are kind of annoyed and the two teachers dragging the kid away are furiously chiding him so as to make an example of the evils of aerial dairy. In the second, everyone joins in.

The cafeteria chose the second.

At my table, John grabbed Tim’s tray and flung it, salad and apple slices exploding outward like dust from a dynamited slope. Having already eaten my sandwich and not wanting to part with my mom’s homemade Christmas cookies, I took a half-eaten apple and bounced it off Charles’s chest before following the herd and crouching down low as sweet and sour chicken landed on my neck and started sliding its way down my back, beneath my shirt. Charles, briefly stunned by the nerd who’d soft-tossed a browning apple off his sternum, was still for just long enough to be an easy target for John, who—having dispatched with Tim’s tray—moved on to separating the top bun from his own cheeseburger and throwing the remainder full-force into Charles’s face, cheese side first.

It was a glorious sight. Soy-sauced rice from the chicken flew in bursts. More milk arced across the sky. Pitiful mixed greens were everywhere.

One of the assistant principals was standing on a table when applesauce hit the back of his head. A language arts/social studies teacher was marching to apprehend a tray-wielder when a carton of two percent whizzed past her earring. Some kids from Brett’s table had taken refuge in the bathroom, but had also cornered themselves there with our very own Gavrilo Princip.

Food fights don’t last very long. Not as long as they last on the Disney Channel. There just isn’t that much food to throw, especially as it breaks apart and falls under lunch table wheels and you do the instinctive thing, the evolutionary thing, which is to try to cover yourself despite the relative harmlessness of most of the projectiles (note: there was a rumor a few weeks later that the kids at Lundahl tried to copy us, and that someone threw a can of pop, and that the pop can caused someone’s brain to bleed, and while I never confirmed this rumor, please only throw harmless things if you are ever in a food fight yourself, and teach your children this important rule of mischief). We weren’t bad kids, for the most part, and our instinctive reaction to adults yelling was to look away quietly, as though we were minding our own business, so soon the mildly expletive-laden exhortations of the language arts/social studies teacher and the vice principal restored order. The sixth graders, who had been queued up outside, were sent to their homerooms to await a clean lunchroom. We were told to clean the lunchroom, as though three hundred twelve and thirteen-year-olds would efficiently take two mops and neatly undo the mayhem they had wrought. Eventually, we were sent back to homeroom ourselves, and then on to the first block of afternoon classes, and finally on to the second block, with reactions from teachers ranging from the horror of our elderly homeroom instructor to the smirking, “so you guys actually did it?” of our confrontational science teacher to the weary, “kids could have gotten hurt and someone has to clean your shit up” of the wise woman who taught us math. The tribunals began immediately, but were of course limited in scope, and rather meaningless—this was middle school, after all, this wasn’t going on any documents sent to colleges. A few kids got a week off of school when we came back from break. A chunk of kids got detention. I think some ratting out was encouraged, but there was no bounty placed upon our classmates’ heads.

The school administration was horrified, and I think this is a reasonable reaction. One instance of a food fight is hilarious, but attempted forced food fights in the future could hurt someone or become an unfair pain in the custodial staff’s ass (while we must always support custodians, I do think being a custodian at a middle school includes the knowledge that once a decade, you will have to clean up after hundreds of adolescents briefly choose anarchy). Parents don’t want to send their kids in for food fight after food fight, and those that do don’t need their kids deciding to take on food fighting as a hobby. For the rest of the year, with maybe a brief exception that was quickly revoked for something made-up like noisiness, we were put into assigned seats—alphabetical order by last name—which ended up being a blast because you got to know kids you hadn’t known before or had written off two years prior as “not your friend.” We were given a short leash, and when effort was lacking in gym class a few months later, gym class became “walking around the track for 45 minutes” class, which was, again, a lot nicer than the previous setup. Threats were made to cancel our eighth grade dance. Our eighth grade dance was not canceled. There were no real negative repercussions for the food fight, because what repercussions could there have been? We were at that slice of life at which the old punishments were meaningless and we were too young to receive any punishments of real consequence. We held the power. Brett, armed with a carton of chocolate milk and a desire to be cool, held the power.

Sweet and sour chicken comes out in the wash. Charles had the cheeseburger off his face within minutes. The sixth graders got to eat their lunch under the hawkish gaze of a beefed-up security force wary of copycat attacks on Crystal Lake Community Consolidated School District 47’s lawful stability. We all went home for the night, and for break, and we told our families and most of them thought it was pretty funny, because it was. A bunch of eighth graders had a legitimate food fight. They did it. They really did it. And now and then, I am reminded of it. The wet heat of chicken and rice on my neck. The expectant wobble of an open milk carton launched through the air.