Hunger Really Is The Best Sauce — But It Makes You Do Strange Things
Image VIA
This age old Irish idiom really is true, especially when you haven’t eaten properly for days.
By the time my friend and I had signed up for a NZ bank account, paid for a few nights in a local hostel and started looking for jobs (in the most lethargic manner possible), we were blindsided by the fact that we only had 20 odd bucks left between us.
In an attempt to hold on to the measly amount we had left, I made a foul concoction of chicken hearts and pasta; this literally made our fellow backpackers gag, but as we were only eating one meal per day by then, it was a glorious feast.
It wasn’t long before we outstayed our welcome at the hostel and were facing homelessness. We were officially down and out. There was one evening left for us to get enough money to spend another night in the hostel and secure ourselves some shelter, so we headed to the local Irish bar in search of treasure.
There was enough cash in the kitty for one packet of peanuts to share, two pints of beer and our entry fee for the weekly pub quiz, where the star prize was a DVD player sporting a tasty RRP of $200. We entered ourselves as ‘Team Fruit Weasel’, nervously slurped on our pints and put our thinking caps together in pursuit of the star prize. We came last.
The next night we were kicking our heels around the street feeling desperate, so we came up with an elaborate plan: to beg a pissed backpacker for the night entry code to the hostel (which changes every five days). It worked — open sesame.
The pair of us stashed our bags behind the communal couches and would wait until nightfall to sneak into the hostel using our top secret code, where we would feast and take refuge in the darkest corners of the building.
We became midnight munchers and scrounged various ingredients from the communal food shelves, using ill fitting, half edible scraps to make weird broths and odd rice combos. We were so hungry, everything tasted incredible as it passed our quivering lips and it was by doing this that I first learned how to cook (well, sort of).
During that period I got so hungry, I tried to shoplift a packet of Burger Ring crisps from the front of a local supermarket – the shopkeeper ran like a Whippet, caught me and confiscated them. Luckily he didn’t press charges.
Lesson three: hunger makes even the foulest of foods taste great. It also drives you to do things you wouldn’t usually do; however, if you are able to harness your energy positively, you’ll find that you can be surprisingly resourceful.
