What Was Your Greatest Food Fight Invention?

[sablebrush52]

Continuing the trend of asking the august members of this forum for information on some of their more dubious achievements, I'm curious about the accomplishments of devotees of the blood sport of food fights.

When I lived in the dorms at UCLA, food fights were a common occurrence. Different floors would threaten revenge on one another and sudden food fights would break out in the cafeteria, with various food missile designs flying over the heads of innocent civilian populations. If you had ever eaten the food you would know that this was a far better and safer use for it than actually eating it.

My modest contribution to food fight technology was the Coke and peanut butter bomb. I created the bomb by employing two of the small cardboard bowls used for the ice cream extruder which were cemented together using a gasket of peanut butter and then filling the cavity with coke before sealing the gasket. You had to work fairly quickly to put together a sufficient pile before the gasket failed, and there was some collateral damage when one of these split apart in mid flight, but the results when a Coke bomb erupted over a student's head could be rather spectacular.

Anyone else with a similar story to share?

 

[warren]

After reading of you well planned and executed "bomb" I feel any of my tales would be inadequate. As a matter of fact, I feel inadequate after just reading your post.

 

[jaytex1969]

I'd guess that few have actually INVENTED a food fight weapon, though many of us have deployed the standard munitions.

New Years Eve 2000, my motorcycle club chapter hit several night spots and, after last call, we ended up at an IHOP.

The place was jammed and out the door. We eventually got seated and found out that over half the staff had just flat out quit that evening. Orders were not coming out, people were getting hungry, upset and short tempered.

My group was rather laid back by comparison, some grumbling but mainly enjoying the show.

An off color comment was launched across the table and the reply was a flying sugar packet.

As one thing most always leads to another, lemon wedges and single serving creamer cups brought escalation.

As the spirit of anarchy found purchase in the crowded room of hungry and drunken revelers, it was only moments from that first sugar packet to a building wide interactive cluster fuck.

I think we were asked not to return after that night..... ?

 

[cosmicfolklore]

Damn, my life experiences are incomplete. I need to go out and throw some food tonight.

 

[ashdigger]

Animal House

 

[renfield]

Not really an invention, more of utilizing terrain to an advantage.

The dorms I lived in (four 12 story towers surrounding a courtyard) were adjacent to some of the training facilities for the football team. The players took it upon themselves to wake up as many people as possible every morning when returning from early practice by screaming in the courtyard for several minutes.

Long story short, in a beautifully coordinated reprisal, many of the residents had accumulated fruit from Food Service over the previous week, which was rained down upon the players from all 4 sides from up to 12 stories up. That ended the daily “wake up calls”.

Back then it was treated as college hijinks. Today it’d probably be a mass of lawsuits and grief counseling.

 

[jpmcwjr]

I doubt I invented it, but it was new to me so I thought it was original. It involved copious amounts of custard, kitchen spoons long enough to catapult gobs of the stuff, and a spiffy lady who was game for the "fight" and the big "make up" that evolved. Said aftermath included the rest of the custard and you'll have to use your own imagination.

 

[Servant King]

Walter Reed Junior High, San Fernando Valley, 1997. Sophomore year, we were blessed with having our PE period right after lunchtime. One day, the kids just weren't as meticulous at cleaning up after themselves as they normally were. We all came outside to a concrete smorgasbord of leftovers. There was both quantity AND variety, and we were all way too juiced up with a disgusting amalgamation of bad food (is there any other kind in LAUSD schools?), corn syrup, and angst from being locked up for hours a few days prior (the infamous North Hollywood Shootout was that week, just a few miles to the north). Without a word spoken between us, as one, we all grabbed what ammo we could, picked a side, and the volley began! World War I style, with an enormous no-man's land in between the two warring factions. It couldn't have lasted for longer than a couple minutes before the PE teachers swarmed the basketball courts, terminating the hail of edible shrapnel (pre-Shock & Awe, mind you) well before the ammo ran out. But man...it certainly was a sight to behold while it lasted.

At least I think it was a sight to behold. I didn't have the luxury of gawking at the spectacle. I was too busy creating my improvised explosive device. The recipe? One (1) bag Skittles (taste the rainbow, biatch!), one (1) unopened bottle of any soda (must be plastic bottle; cans are no good here), and one (1) box Mentos, any flavor. The trick was to get the timing right. You had to have both candies opened and ready to go. The Mentos instigates the foaming, and the skittles are the shrapnel! Open the soda, get the skittles in FIRST, then pop in a handful of Mentos (I found 5-8 was ideal), close quickly, shake several times quickly, and lob that MoFo as high and as hard as you can! The result? I don't know who I hit, if anyone, with my carbonated chemical concoction, but I will tell you this: whoever they are, I wouldn't want to be liable for covering their accrued therapy bills.

Sigh...to be a 13 year old again. Gosh, I'd have stocked up on tobacco like CRAZY...

 

[bayareabriar]

I appreciate your story. Baby boomers lived a lot freer; protests, streaking, etc.

I was in 1st grade and my older brother in 5th. This was 1990. We started a food fight with about 100 kids in the cafeteria.

After the penguins started breaking skulls and completely loosing their shit we eventually tried sticking food to the cieling (probably 20 ft high). If you can imagine a hundred kids throwing foot straight up with complete regard of where it landed as soon as we weren’t in the gaze of Sister Mary Menopause only to have the food land on or in proximity.

To this day there is a sliced banana stuck to the gym/cafeteria ceiling.

 

[rmpeeps]

It involved Southwest Airlines.
Ten of us choppered into New Orleans after 14 days offshore.
We had about a 2hr wait for our SW flight to Houston. So we hit the lounge. Spirits were high when we boarded the plane. Just after drinks and peanuts were passed around one of our guys found the case of peanuts. Peanut bags were flying from one end of the plane to the other! That’s when the flight attendant confronted the tosser, ended up across his lap, and he quickly figured out that she was quite ticklish! Giggling mayhem ensued!! She was giving as good as she got! Another flight attendant shouted demands for order and promptly got popped in her pixie-cut by a volley of peanuts.
About that time the pilot announced our approach to Houston, everything stopped, seats were put forward, seatbelts fastened, and drink trays put up.
Like nothing ever happened.
Upon de-planing, the 2 flight attendants with hair all askance, thanked us for flying with Southwest Airlines “and have a wonderful time in Houston!! “
The only fallout was prior to our next crew change, our employer requested everybody please stow any company logo’d caps or windbreakers in their carryon bags prior to subsequent flights.
1978 was a lot different than 2021.

 

[Servant King]

1978 was a lot different than 2021.

Tell me about it! They won't even serve peanuts anymore...

 

[dino]

At Lane Tech High School (4000 guys, in the early 60s), I sat with the football team at lunch. I had made the team, but because I had an afterschool job, couldn't make practices, so I got dropped. The guys still considered me part of their team. The lunchroom had, at any of the periods, about 500 guys. (It was an all-boys school). Food fights would break out all the time. Usually table vs. table or section vs. section.
As part of our lunch, the cafeteria staff would give us a roll and a pat of butter. I became a master at launching 1/4 pieces of these pats with the dinky spreader they gave us (no plastic back then, all steel utensils). Whenever a fight began, my football buddies would supply me with all their butter pats, which I would cut into fours and launch at the "enemy." There was nothing funnier than to see our opponents with butter stuck to their foreheads, or in their pompadour hairdos. And, because I was a little shorter than the team guys, who formed a kind of phalanx around me, I rarely got hit with any food.

 

[Country Bladesmith]

My brother, my cousin, and I had a powdered sugar war when we were kids, with some younger guy at Cafe du Monde in New Orleans (the original one). No innovation on anyone’s part, but it was good fun. Somewhere there’s a Polaroid floating around that showed the aftermath. All of us, including the guy that was a complete stranger, standing there covered in powdered sugar.

Other than that, I’ve never been a fan of food fights. As a matter of fact, I hit a boy over the head with my lunch tray in elementary school when he poured his chocolate milk onto my food. One of my many stays in after-school detention. ?‍

 

[cosmicfolklore]

I guess if we consider ice to be food…. I entered the dorms as a freshman the year they decided to put ice machines on each floor of the dorms. On a toga party night, someone stole a stack of cafe trays and we emptied all of the ice machines down the hallway. And we all surfed the halls on the trays half naked, with a few girls totally naked. It was fun till one of the naked girls fell down the stairwell. She couldn’t stay on top of the tray. Our punishment was to live with wet floors for about a week, which was sorta disconcerting.
our dorm RS was a 30something Greek pre-Med student who didn’t care what we did, as long as we kept him steeped in Ouzo and cigarettes.

 

[CoffeeAndBourbon]

It involved Southwest Airlines.
Ten of us choppered into New Orleans after 14 days offshore.
We had about a 2hr wait for our SW flight to Houston. So we hit the lounge. Spirits were high when we boarded the plane. Just after drinks and peanuts were passed around one of our guys found the case of peanuts. Peanut bags were flying from one end of the plane to the other! That’s when the flight attendant confronted the tosser, ended up across his lap, and he quickly figured out that she was quite ticklish! Giggling mayhem ensued!! She was giving as good as she got! Another flight attendant shouted demands for order and promptly got popped in her pixie-cut by a volley of peanuts.
About that time the pilot announced our approach to Houston, everything stopped, seats were put forward, seatbelts fastened, and drink trays put up.
Like nothing ever happened.
Upon de-planing, the 2 flight attendants with hair all askance, thanked us for flying with Southwest Airlines “and have a wonderful time in Houston!! “
The only fallout was prior to our next crew change, our employer requested everybody please stow any company logo’d caps or windbreakers in their carryon bags prior to subsequent flights.
1978 was a lot different than 2021.

That was a great story!

 

[kcghost]

I don't know if you'd call it an invention but the last time I told the wife here cooking wasn't up to par it started a helluva row.

 

[STP]

Bluto’s “invention” ?

 

[anotherbob]

None. What a horrid waste.

 

[mso489]

Both my folks' families were hit hard by the Great Depression, so though both sides had worked their way through to comfortable enough livings, there was a great undercurrent of pent up thrift. Wasting food was a sore spot. Throwing it would have been heresy. No food fights for me. dino, I think my high school, Maine Twp. East, played Lane Tech in sports. Maine East had 4,000 students, and I graduated with a class of 999. You had to be a significant athlete to make a team, and I wasn't.

 

[sablebrush52]

there was a great undercurrent of pent up thrift. Wasting food was a sore spot. Throwing it would have been heresy. No food fights for me.

Same for me, but we're talking about dorm "food" not actual food.

This was the food service that unintentionally discovered the world's most powerful laxative. The occasion was a "special" dinner menu to welcome the new assistant dean of girls to the running the women's wing of the dorm. Since she was Latinex (I think this is the currently acceptable descriptor) they decided to make chicken molé.

As far as I know, no one in that kitchen knew anything about molé except that it was supposedly peanut and chocolate. So they mixed up a bunch of Skippy and Bosco and dumped it over the raw chicken, then baked it.

When I passed through the line and looked at the trays of bubbling brown behind the sneeze guard I was filled with a sense of dread, and decided to avoid the molé. Most people went for it, as it was a potential improvement over decommissioned US Cavalry.

About 40 minutes after dinner, students were seized with an urgent and inescapable need to go on a bombing run and the toilets were subjected to a frenzied assault by hundreds of desperate teens on all floors, which in turn overloaded the building's plumbing, causing it to cease to function. It was a perfect storm.