The dining hall: R.H.I.P. culture and the Tavis diet regime

texture · 11 Nov YDAU

• When: supper, 1810h, 11 Nov YDAU (West House dining hall, 133 kids + 13 staff)
• What: The academy's central social institution at full grain. The E.T.A. dining hall (first floor of West House) runs on rank: "the top upperclassmen get the best table, an unspoken tradition," and 18-A's take free cuts in the seconds line — "R.H.I.P." The diet is administrative policy: since Tavis's headmastership the milk is a powdered-skim placebo (kitchen "power-mixes it in enormous steel bowls" and re-bags it, because "the skim milk at E.T.A. has been pre-mixed powdered milk since Charles Tavis assumed the helm four years back and told Mrs. Clarke he wanted the kids' animal-fat intake halved"), the bread is bicycled in sugarless and low-gluten from Bread & Circus because Tavis and Schtitt "believe [glutens] promote torpor and excess mucus," and the dispenser signage reads "MILK IS FILLING; DRINK WHAT YOU TAKE." The Eschaton casualties surface here as institutional cost: Evan Ingersoll returns on crutches (ruptured patellar tendon, six months lost), J.J. Penn's femoral fracture will cost a year. Backdrop of anxiety: the rumored O.N.A.N.T.A. urine-scan hanging over Hal, Axford, and Pemulis (see event 22). The scene also glosses E.T.A. as "a comparatively unsexual place" where "the whole Tavis/Schtitt program here is supposedly a progression toward self-forgetting." See the Charles Tavis timeline, the Hal timeline.