Many of my memories of RRMC revolve around food, particularly recruit camp and just prior.  When I first applied to RRMC at the recruiting office in Edmonton, I was sent for a physical at CFB Namao.  The first time I did so, the doctor told me I was underweight and needed to go put on ten pounds and come back.  At the time I think I weighed maybe 118 pounds.  (I blame some of that on all the running I started doing in Grade 12 so I would be able to run the mile and a half within the CF standard.)  So I went home and started trying to put on weight by supplementing my usual diet with daily milkshakes containing eggs and bananas.  By the time I had put on enough weight, I was sick of those milkshakes.  When I had my rescheduled medical, the doctor (not the same one I originally had) told me my weight was fine but that he would have passed me in the first place because I would put on enough weight when I got to RRMC.  All those milkshakes for nothing…

The food at RRMC was excellent.  RRMC was the first place I ever had scallops and I loved them – at first.   Eventually I overdid it, ordering them whenever they were on the menu, to the point where I couldn’t look at another scallop -  but I got over it.  We were burning off a lot of calories so probably would have eaten anything but the good food was something we really looked forward to.  Although the food was good, some of the other things associated with mealtimes during recruit term were not so great, including bizarre eating drills and steadying up to ask seniors to pass the cruets (salt and pepper), water or any other out-of-reach condiment. They seemed a little silly or inconvenient, but mostly because they impeded our ability to scarf food down in the short time available. The worst thing when it came to food though were the Extra Locker Inspections (ELIs). 

On the ground floor of Nixon Block where the dining hall and classrooms were located, we each had lockers where we kept our PT gear, rifles, etc.  Since we were always rushing from one activity to another, we didn’t always have time to keep these lockers neat and tidy, especially after PT.  Occasionally we would have an unscheduled ELI right after the lunch meal, often presaged by various seniors singing under their breath “ELI’s coming…” after a popular song.  Those thinly veiled warnings made it difficult to eat as your stomach crawled realizing what condition your locker or rifle was in, and the consequences that would inevitably follow.

Kye was another eagerly-awaited tradition as we got our evening snack after study hours.  The responsibility for picking up kye from the kitchen in Nixon Block and bringing it back to the Junior and Senior Common Rooms in Grant Block rotated among flights in accordance with the Junior Duty Cadet assignment, as described in Scott Mills’ excellent summary in “Roads Memories – Junior Duty Cadet”.  However, having seen some of the rather “interesting” ingredients secretly added to the kye by the duty flight members prior to delivery to the common rooms, I wonder whether it was always fit for consumption.  It didn’t matter much at the time, because it seemed we were always hungry.

At the end of recruit term, we had a special treat.  I don’t know if this was a general tradition, but at least in my flight we had a Mac party where we put in our orders for whatever we wanted from McDonalds and someone would go pick up the order and bring it back to the flight.  As usual, I was hungry, and my eyes were bigger than my stomach, so I put in my order for four Big Macs and four chocolate milkshakes (I had gotten over my disgust with milkshakes by then and besides these didn’t have eggs and bananas in them).  When the order arrived, we recruits were all seated in the hallway outside our rooms and started chowing down.  I made it through all four Big Macs and two of the milkshakes, but that was all I could manage.  My efforts didn’t go unnoticed though.  I recently discovered a picture that one of my flight mates had taken of us all eating in the hallway and gave to me.  On the back, he jokingly had scrawled beside my name an appropriate metaphor for my gastronomic feat!