Last Saturday, the Fresh Food Café held its much-beloved Midnight Breakfast in honor of Fall Fest. It was a sensational disaster.
What went wrong? For one thing, the FFC was simply ill equipped to deal with the volume of students who attended. By midnight the line stretched well out the door and the food — previously prepared and set out — lasted all of five minutes. As a result, the FFC became instantly congested; as more students arrived, the line only grew longer. Blue Jays, expecting savory bacon and delicious pancakes, found only bare plates and pissed-off freshmen.
Thus, breakfast at midnight slowly became scraps of hash browns at one a.m. From the evidence, one is inclined to believe that the FFC staff simply miscalculated the amount of students who would attend Midnight Breakfast. Such a mistake, while obviously an oversight, would only signify a surface-level error. Presumably, if the organizational forces behind the event had forecasted correctly, there would have been more than enough food.
According to the coordinator of Campus Programming, though, approximately 1,000 students attended Midnight Breakfast, which was exactly the number Campus Programming was expecting.
This makes the error even more enigmatic, not to mention egregious. The FFC was vastly under-prepared to deal with a horde of students they anticipated. How is this possible?
To be fair, the blame does not rest with the event’s organizers alone. Evidently, the students attending Midnight Breakfast did their best to make the experience as unpleasant as possible for everyone involved. In the face of excessive lines and a shortage of food, students should have taken the logical path and simply forgone the event entirely. As alluring as free food can certainly be, it is hard to imagine that it could be worth waiting an hour for a meal served everyday at FFC’s “Late Night”.
But, as anyone who attended the breakfast can attest, Hopkins students proved exceedingly immature and inconsiderate. At the front of the lines, the cafeteria floor transformed into something from a metal concert. Kids began pushing, cutting and posturing to receive their petty portion of pancakes. Even worse was the attitude that accompanied such behavior. Once inside the FFC, students abandoned any sense of solidarity that may have previously existed, treating fellow students without the courtesy most would extend to strangers.
In light of the incident, this page would like to make a few recommendations. To begin, if the FFC and Campus Programming continue to hold Midnight Breakfast and similar events, they need to adequately prepare for large numbers of students. This necessitates, at the very least, providing more staff and cooking much more food; last Sunday, both of these crucial aspects were lacking. The fact that security and S.A.F.E. employees attended the event, though, is a promising sign and bodes well for the future.
Furthermore, the student body needs to adopt a more responsible and mature attitude when individuals interact with their peers. There is no place for a sense of entitlement or disrespect at community events, especially those meant to foster goodwill between students.
Midnight Breakfast has, in the past, been a success, and this page hopes that such an event can again be both enjoyable and satisfying in the future.
