The autumn food festival filled the cafeteria terrace on Saturday with twelve stalls, an orderly system of tasting portions, and — by mid-afternoon — a genuine competitive upset: the three-time sticker-vote champions lost their crown to a team of first-years nobody had scouted.
The festival, run by the food society, invites teams of students and families to cook dishes from their home regions and traditions. Visitors buy a tasting card and vote for their favourite stall with stickers — a system introduced two years ago after the previous “loudest cheer” method was, in the society’s official words, “compromised by the drama club.”
The upset
The winning stall served hand-folded dumplings from a family recipe, produced at a pace that drew a permanent queue and a certain amount of tactical study from rival stalls. “Our secret is that there are six of us and our grandmother trained four,” said team captain Lin Wei, a first-year.
The dethroned champions — a senior team famous for their flatbreads — took second by eleven stickers and were, by all accounts, gracious for at least an hour.
We’ve had a three-year run. Losing to dumplings that good is honourable. Losing to first-years means the festival has a future. We’re fine. We’re completely fine.
flatbread team captain, senior
Proceeds from tasting cards — the festival’s best total yet — go to the food society’s equipment fund and the winning team’s chosen cause. The spring edition returns after the break, and the dumpling team has confirmed, to widespread relief, that it will defend.
Behind the tasting-card economy
The tasting-card system, now in its third festival, quietly solved the event’s two oldest problems: cash handling by minors (there is none — cards are bought at one supervised stand) and the tragedy of the over-committed stomach (portions are small by rule, so a card covers six or seven stalls). The society publishes the accounts on its noticeboard after each festival, a transparency habit it adopted from the student council’s budget reforms — proof, the treasurer noted, that governance fashions travel.