Let Them Eat Hash

The training meal has been a sacred part of the athletic credo for centuries. As a recent study of the matter concluded, "It has its roots in the superstition and magic of the unrecorded past." At one time men ate powdered lion's teeth to make them strong, and similar practices prevail in many primitive cultures even now.

Today at most U.S. colleges lion's teeth have been abandoned in favor of red meat, solid vegetables, milk, and fruit; but aside from this change in the menu, the ancient ritual goes on. And this is no less true of Harvard than any place else.

Nearly every day in the Varsity Club a host of hungry athletes sit down to a regular training-table lunch. They are men whose sports are "in season"--that is, baseball-players in the spring, swimmers in the winter, football-men in the fall (these last get both lunch and dinner), and so forth. Financial support for this rather elaborate eating program comes from the funds appropriated by the Administration to the Athletic Department. The total expenditure may run well over $10,000 a year.

One suspects that there are many undergraduates who do not know about all this; and who, if they did know, might be something less than enthusiastic about paying to keep the athlete eating roast beef, while the rest of us subsist on pecan fritters or goulash. But even setting aside this very legitimate kind of jealousy, there are good reasons why the training-table system is open to serious question.

It does its greatest damage, perhaps, in segregating athletes from the mainstream of college life. Meals in the House dining rooms, no matter how unfortunate in their culinary aspects, are clearly a very good way of making new friends. Athletes miss out on this to some extent; and athletes are a rather isolated group to begin with--given the need for long afternoon practices, trips to other colleges, etc.

Even the old argument that good food is necessary for good athletic performance has lost much of its force, in the face of strong medical evidence to the contrary. An exhaustive study by three doctors at the Harvard School of Public Health two years ago seemed to prove that the physiological effects of the training meal were negligible. The only consolation offered to old-school devotees was the possibility of psychological benefits--viz. "the sense of security generally attainable by the practice of rituals" or ego-building derived from "eating red meat as a symbol of manly vigor."

The training meal immediately before an athletic contest, however, is a horse of another color, and this should clearly be retained. But so long as the University pays lip service to the ideal of mixing people with diverse backgrounds and interests, its continued support of the daily training-table will seem very strange indeed.