Bwog sat down with Barnard junior Naomi Rubin about an unfortunate finding in her dinner last night, adding to what has now become a trilogy of food mishaps.

On the evening of December 8, Barnard junior Naomi Rubin thought through her dining hall options for dinner. She was reminded of one of her favorite meals, the Very Berry Salad in Ferris’s sandwich station, and decided to betray her usual go-to spot, John Jay. In a conversation with Bwog, Rubin recited the ingredients by memory—mango, arugula, strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries. The final ingredient was one she did not expect.

Rubin’s excitement grew as the Ferris employee put a lot of the berry salad on her plate. She grabbed a piece of lemon bread “because it was Wednesday” and took a seat with her friend. Around six or seven bites in, she spotted a large strawberry—“I lift up the strawberry and there is a full grasshopper in the salad. It was underneath the strawberry. It was there the whole time.”

When Bwog asked Rubin how she felt after this surprise, she explained that “My first reaction was ‘How? When?’”

Rubin described the grasshopper as “dead but in perfect condition.” Her hypotheses of its cause of death consisted of the following: perhaps it died of cardiac arrest, maybe it was overwhelmed by the arugula or was pressured under the strawberry, or maybe it could’ve been entirely natural, and it was a good way for it to go.

In the conversation with Bwog, Rubin ended by stating she does not hold this against the lovely dining staff at Ferris—“This was not their fault. It was just a grasshopper who strayed too far from home.”

Photos via Naomi Rubin, BC ’23 and Maya Hafeez, BC ’24