With the return of law students to school this 2013-2014 year, some are a bit surly, it seems, to return to class. One in particular, a woman from Osgoode Hall Law school in Toronto, wrote a scathing email to her classmates regarding the endless gnawing and chewing and snack-consumption in class. Though web sites like Above the Law have referred to this woman as the “Food Nazi” — hardly original, that — I’m rooting for the girl. She’s fairly hilarious in her address of her fellow students, and one has to wonder why these students have to be crunching away at Doritos every hour of the day. Here is some of what she said, as reported by Above the Law:
I have a great amount of sympathy for those of us in this class who are more fundamentally challenged. The ones who seem to suffer from a complete lack of etiquette and common courtesy as well as from peculiar eating disorders. I get it, that home life must have supremely difficult, and the public school system was so lacking that no one taught you how to behave in public, and, specifically, how to eat in public. And how not to.
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So let me help. Here are some basic guiding principles that should help you navigate your eating frenzies during our classes together for this semester:
1. There IS a ten minute break in between the two hours that we study. You do NOT need to start gorging on your food as soon as the lesson starts. For those of you with slightly less chronic eating disorders, I beseech you to please wait out the first hour before unfolding and then munching away like a horse on your chosen dish, which turns our classroom into a stable.
It’s really not that hard to wait until the break to start eating. Incredibly, you might also learn something about administrative law if you paid attention to what is being taught, instead of what is in your sandwich
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2. Food selection: if you are so unable to time manage appropriately, and/or you are utterly incapable of waiting for the break to eat, may I be so bold as to recommend to you what not to bring as your dish of the day?
Tuna sandwiches: they stink up the entire room
Deli sandwiches: see above
Apples, pineapples and other crunchy fruit: your helpless classmates are here to study. We want to hear the professor, not the gnashing of your teeth and the crunch crunch crunch
Chips: Really? I mean, really? Refer to above point about the noise. But to add, you’re dying of hunger, and you choose to stuff your face with a bag of chips? Out of all available food options? It’s not very healthy, you know.
Of course the email is bitchy, but so what? Why should students be distracted from their assiduous studies that come at considerable cost and effort to hear some fellow student mowing down and masticating a bag of chips, celery or some other gustatory disturbance?
The students have struck back against the email, focusing on the fact that pineapples are “NOT CRUNCHY,” and that they should all have “Pineapple Appreciation Day” to defend the “glory” of the fruit. A bunch of mutton-heads, this class.
But I suppose practicing how to peeve and annoy each other will come in handy with their career aims, and so this little bit of education on the side will only improve their legal capacities.