Boarding school food was akin to prison food, especially if you attended a government boarding school. The dining food was trash, badly-prepared with an assortment of flies and dirt. What do you get when you throw hungry Nigerians teenagers in a place like this? You get a weird mix of concoctions and iterations of meals that once again prove that many boarding schools are basically glorified prisons for kids.

Life in a boarding school is like living on the edge, I sometimes wonder how we survived after eating and experiencing so much nonsense.

If you ate only cereal, biscuit flakes and good food in secondary school, this post is not for you. Boarding school food is the weirdest thing you’ll probably eat in your entire life, and in case you’re wondering if you could try that diet now and get away with it, we’re here to tell you that you won’t. Still, I have to give points to the kids who came up with these meals to supplement whatever mess they had to eat in the dining hall.

Your stomach has evolved since those wild days, and these foods would definitely give you food poisoning today:

Boarding schools don’t have access to stoves, so students got inventive about cooking contraband Indomie noodles. As opposed to the cooking directions on the pack, this ‘meal’ is prepared by soaking the noodles in a flask until it’s soft. The garnish is typically a can of sardines mixed with ground pepper for flavour.

Verdict: Absolutely gross. Inyama!

Whoever came up with the idea of the garri cake had to be a genius. The formula is simple: a mixture of garri, water, lots of sugar, milk and milo is left to solidify. This treat is then cut into slices and voila, you have a piece of garri cake that’s strong enough to choke you.

Verdict: Imagine eating this garri cake today. Tastes like teenage tears and suffering.

‘Last Night’ was a boarding school ritual on the night before the school holidays where students would stir their leftover provisions into a bucket of water just enough for the interested parties to consume.

Verdict: I guess this tradition was responsible for the bouts of typhoid most of you had each holiday. That and the dining hall food, sha.

Feshelu is what you get when you crave eba and have no access to hot water or soup. Feshelu is supposed to be the boarding school iteration of eba and soup made from tins of sardines or geisha. As you can imagine, the eba is prepared with cold water and is often hard enough to use as a weapon. Again, prison! For a real homey touch, a pinch of dry pepper is added for some spice.

Editor’s note: In some schools, feshelu was prepared by mixing the garri with the sardine paste as seen in this photo by 9jaFoodie.

Verdict: Feshelu was for the elite and is relatively the least gross of the pick since you basically had to swallow the concoction. Well, sorry to the people who chew their swallow sha.

If you thought you turned out okay after consuming all of these, I am here to tell you otherwise. Which of these was your fave thing to eat?

Featured image: The Kitchen Butterfly