Our depression at being unable to fry our retinas with my uber-monitor while wasting time playing video games was not softened by the fact that we were eating like prisoners, and not those "cool" tax evasion prisoners in country club detention centers.  This has never ceased to amaze me... Deephaven is specifically designed to rake money in from rich people.  Everywhere you look, there are guests walking around, pretending not to be members of the US Treasury Board, CEO's of major conglomerates, or the lazy inheritors of generations of wisely invested slave trading and cotton plantation money.  They try really hard with "casual" clothes, but the green pants and docksiders give them away constantly.  They show up every year, desperate to keep their yearly "claim" on highly sought-after tiny drafty firetraps of cabins that cost as much to rent per week as I like to spend on 6 months' rent.  You would think then that their palates would demand a higher quality of comestibles.  Think again.

Everyone takes their meals at the "starch bar," as I have been calling the dining hall since my first summer as an invader to Deephaven.  Bland slop is warmed up a little by uninterested college students in an ancient kitchen and then ladled out into steam trays by similarly bored, hot young euro trash chicks who thought working at Deephaven would be a cheap way to see America.  (Ha ha.)  The quality of the food, despite the camp's no doubt incredible profit margin, is at the same level as anything you might have experienced in a public elementary school, sleepover sports camp, or halfway house.

The fact that this food is just so goddamned awful tends to increase our weekly expenses as we trek far far away from the dining hall in order to search for something remotely digestible.  Keep in mind that Deephaven is approximately 4 light years from the closest "town," a label used generously to describe any area with a population density of greater than 1 per square mile.  These trips are almost always dismal failures, as the few residents of the area know that it's tourist season, and "dem rich folks is a comin' through to give up some big bucks for our leftover hog feed."  Considering the low low quality of the Soylent Green substitutes we get force fed at the slop line, leftover hog feed sounds pretty damn good.

Here are some of the things we were forced to eat at Deephaven, and the long-distance substitutes we gratefully shelled out huge wads of cash for:
 

Deephaven Slop Line	Superior Tourist Season Supplement
Rendered animal products poured into a taco shell	Rendered fish products siphoned into a "crab roll"
"Just Add Water" brand mashed potatoes	"Just Add Tons of Hot Sauce" brand spicy chicken arm bones
Frozen pizzas under a heat lamp	Frozen pizzas under a heat lamp with oregano
10% fat-free burgers with big tasty gristle bits	20% fat-free burgers with meat texturing
A salad bar consisting of iceberg lettuce and motor oil	Grass from a cow pasture
Unidentifiable "minestrone" simmered in a garbage can	Nobody eats soup
Powdered fruit-colored drinks, powdered milk, and powdered lake water	Wiedeman's beer, which runs a close second to Pabst Blue Ribbon in overall quality
A single gigantic roast beef-like thing which was eventually transformed into other dishes throughout the week as is slowly decomposed with the help of a small colony of flies	Fasting

The only positive side to eating at the "dining hall" for me is the looks of sheer terror I get when stalking into the place on the first day, the gasps, the women holding their children tightly until I'm a safe distance away.  Maybe it's the black leather.  Maybe it's the ambiguous ethnicity.  Maybe it's the fact that not only am I pretending to be poor, I am poor, a fact which radiates from my worn clothing and pavement-scuffed Lugz as clearly as a big neon warning light flashing over my head saying, "AMBIGUOUSLY ETHNIC SCARY PERSON WITHOUT TRUST FUND, PLEASE REMAIN CALM."  Once in a while I pretend like I'm just an eccentric genius millionaire, like when I used to visit my dad at the World Trade Center and gain access to all the secure server rooms because I look like a wacked coder.  It never works... you can dress up as nice as you like, but there's no hiding the fact that you didn't get your ripped and broken Jansport knockoff belt pouch at Louvier.