Now with the new fourth meal, students can avoid strolling along side streets and listening to all that rambling chit chat. They can just slam down the books, dash over to the dining commons and slug down a "warm and fresh." It's a beautiful system, really. As sleek and efficient as a fax.

Then there's the whole issue of setting priorities. With the fourth meal, Harvard says to students: Your work is everything. If it takes 18 hours a day to complete, then trim back extraneous details like eating and sleeping and get to it! You never know who may be staying up one hour later than you.

This competition marathon is undeniably good practice for life after Harvard. Graduates will have developed a keen eye for looking over their shoulders and constitutions that feed on the endless challenge of more and more work. After all, getting ahead is what matters. Who needs something as unproductive as a languid autumn afternoon?

The fourth meal also avoids that archaic concept of everyone eating together at the same time. "If Harvard wants to be a diverse school, it has to have diverse meals," one junior declared.

Dining diversity eliminates the need for actually conversing with a wide range of classmates, people with whom a student may not have much in common--at least not at first gulp. With dining options closely resembling a "cruise ship," Harvard undergraduates can indeed cruise in and cruise out without ever docking for more than a quick fill-up.

Harvard's deans soon will begin hashing out details about the fourth meal. Besides giving substance to the whole "warm and fresh" concept, the deans no doubt also will have to confront the significant challenge of what to name the innovation.

If the deans opt for a hybrid name based on the "brunch" model, the choices could include "brupper," "dinfast" or "breakner." But then with such a cutting-edge invention, the name needs to more millennium-minded. Some newly coined word that captures the dash of the times, our 24/7 immediacy. Something that has just the right alignment with our own Internet-worth: "Food.edu."