ROTC Boodle Fight

Rating:
Category:	Restaurants
Cuisine:	Other
Location:	Philippines

Boodle fight. That is what they call it. It consists of a long line of banana leaves serving as plate for rice, tuna, corned beef, and assorted vegetables. Then, a bunch of people stand around the table, picking up food with bare hands, bringing the food to their buccal cavities, and ingesting it. And eating as much of it as possible. And I was included in one.

I took a few units in Military Science 1, wondering as to why everything has to have "Science" slapped on it. Yes, I know that this world is in the scientific era, but our activities are less on traditional scientific methodolgy than scholastico-physical learning. And in one such meeting we had a boodle fight, so that we can learn some core values while having dinner at the same time. Now that is time management.

However, like all other activities like studying and driving a car, eating is best concentrated upon. No multi-tasking. Seriously. Studying while eating is ineffective because you can't focus on the lessons, and you can't notice that you are full and getting needlessly fatter and poorer. Fighting while eating is also unhealthy; people fight for feeding, not while feeding. Thus out-eating everybody else in a show of competitiveness would make you win, but then you didn't enjoy eating at all, so why eat? You have enough nutrients to survive for a few days, and not digesting too much would increase life expectancy significantly. In that way, the boodle fight loses a few stars because you fight for your food and chow it down before you can even enjoy it, greatly reducing the Happiness Resource (HR) derived. And whatever important life-changing lessons or philosophical insights derivable from eating at that moment is quickly dropped because you are still too busy eating to notice.

Another con for it is the choice of food. Rice is good. Corned beef is good with rice, and is cheap enough for mass-feeding. But the sardines in oil leaves a bad feeling on the hands and worse, the stomach, more so since we should eat more of it since it is a boodle fight. I personally prefer sardines in tomato sauce, since it is healthier than oil and not as mean on the stomach, though it is annoying on the hands. And whoever put the mixed vegetables there...it is good that somebody thought of bringing vegetables for variety, but combining them with the corned beef and the sardines is not smart because their flavors clash in a manner most unpalatable. Had it been as a side, it would have been more welcome to my tongue. Delaying drinking water is nice, since that means we can stuff more food inside us, but that only worked because no one though of carrying hot-n-spicy sardines...

So what else do I dislike? Not using utensils is inconvenient, nor having enough chairs or even letting us sit to eat in the first place, but that is just petty and will not make the boodle fight memorable. All those stuff in paragraph 3 are excusable since this is a boodle fight anyway; a new experience to be contemplated upon the grasslands underneath the stars instead. So it just boils down to the choice of food instead why I disliked that particular boodle fight, and that I dislike boodle fights in general, why it gets only 3 stars.

So where do the 3 stars come from? Well, for starters we ate food after a long day of exams, so the timing is good, thus a star. No one put hot-n-spicy whatever, so that is another star. Finally, this star comes from experience that by itself is unique and dispels the ennui of leading the normally repetitive lifestyle I am experiencing up to now inching me forward slowly Somewhere Down the Road... to Perdition. Ahahahaha.