Читать книгу The Nature of College - James J. Farrell - Страница 45

The first lesson of Cafeteria 101 is that food is a social construction, which doesn’t just mean that there’s a recipe involved. Different cultures define food differently, teaching us what counts as edible, how to prepare and present it, how to serve it, and how to eat it. Eating seems so natural that we often forget how many cultural rules we follow without thinking. We could eat dogs and cats, but we don’t, because we adhere to cultural conventions. We might eat all our food raw, but we don’t, because cooking is the cultural process we’ve chosen for making our food more digestible. We might eat without utensils, scooping up food with our hands, but we don’t, because we see forks, knives, and spoons as signs of civilization. We are what we eat, and not just physically, because diet defines human community. Different peoples eat differently, and culinary identities are the basis of what we call “ethnic” cuisines. In the cafeteria, students eat Chinese, Mexican, Italian, and French, but all with an American twist. Taken together, cultural rules about food determine both what we can eat and how we get our food from the earth.²

Another lesson in the cafeteria curriculum concerns privilege, because the cafeteria reinforces both American affluence and the ideology of choice, the idea that we deserve options in our lives. It simply seems “natural,” but the standard college cafeteria is cornucopian, implicitly assuring students of the fertility of the world and the fertile ingenuity of the people who convert nature’s bounty to all this food. In circumstances like these, even though we’re not at Burger King, we feel deep down that we can “have it our way.”³

Still, some students are perpetually dissatisfied with cafeteria food, carping about “the same old crap” being served week after week. But the “crappiness” of cafeteria food isn’t usually a statement of quality: It’s a statement of expectations and entitlement, and a statement of American values. One of the most common college complaints, for example, is that “there’s nothing to eat” in the cafeteria. As a literal statement, this is demonstrably false. But as a statement of our American expectations, it’s delectably illuminating. This complaint isn’t a statement about food or scarcity, but about individualism and novelty. We want food that satisfies our tastes, and we want it at every meal.

Cafeteria food, then, is an example of what historian Sidney Mintz calls “a taste of freedom.” The free choices—of pizza, pasta, or chicken patties—make students feel good, both in the choosing and in the eating. As Mintz suggests, “The employment of food to achieve a feeling of well-being or freedom is widely felt and understood. The satisfactions seem modest; the meal one eats confirming that ‘you deserve a break today’ may be neither expensive nor unusual. And yet this act of choosing to consume apparently can provide a temporary, even if mostly spurious, sense of choice, of self, and thereby of freedom.” The french fries really are, as congressional Republicans said in 2003, “freedom fries.”⁴

In addition to its lessons about affluence and options, the modern cafeteria teaches ignorance and indifference. As currently constituted, most cafeterias screen students from relationships with the people, land, and ecological communities that produce and process the food eaten each day. Like most Americans, most college students don’t know where their food comes from, and most don’t care. In this way, the cafeteria exemplifies the problem of invisible complexity because it shows how institutions working in our name put our money where our mouths aren’t. Colleges tell their food service administrators, either explicitly or implicitly, that they want good food for a low price. These administrators, in turn, look for dependable suppliers whose economies of scale allow them to provide economies of sale. When cafeterias buy food, then, they reinforce some American values and marginalize others. College food purchasing policies are always institutional expressions of value, which often contradict the values of individual eaters.

While money doesn’t always change hands in the cafeteria, meals there do eventually cost something, reinforcing the assumption that food is a commodity. Even though food there is a sign of freedom, it’s not free. If students don’t pay, they don’t eat. Millions of Americans suffer from hunger because a culture of commodification considers the freedom of markets to be more important than the nutritional needs of citizens. In 2006, almost one out of every twenty-five people in the United States, many of them children, experienced chronic hunger. Everybody pays for food, of course, and we do have food stamp programs in this country. But the food system of the richest country in the history of the world leaves some people foraging in dumpsters and lining up at food shelves. And the situation is worse in developing nations. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that more than a billion people—about a sixth of humanity—suffer from malnutrition, and more than thirty thousand people a day die of hunger. There’s plenty of food in the cafeteria, but plenty of other places where there’s not, and those two realities are not unrelated.⁵

The cafeteria curriculum also teaches lessons about the culture of labor in America. Cafeteria food is a classic example of interdependence and specialization. Other people feed students so that they can focus on their academic work. Even though they provide one of life’s necessities, cafeteria workers (often women and immigrants) don’t make much money because American fast-food companies keep their costs down by lobbying Congress for the most minimal minimum-wage laws. “Caf” workers enjoy some flexibility in their hours, but they receive few benefits for their labor. In this way, poor workers subsidize the appetites of the affluent. They take care of student’s emotions, too, as line workers are often programmed to process each and every customer with the “commercial smile,” the compulsory friendliness of service workers in the American economy. How we choose to eat, therefore, affects how other people bring home the bacon.⁶

As this suggests, the cafeteria is also a classic example of our unconsidered power and privilege. Through the machinery of the market, we decide what will be planted and harvested on farms worldwide. Our tastes determine whether farm workers will plant subsistence crops for themselves or market crops for us. Our institutional preference for cheap fare determines how food gets produced and processed in this country and as far away as China. When we open our mouths to eat, we are expressing an opinion that is taken very seriously in farm fields and food factories around the world. Students at college haven’t generally considered the consequences of that power, and so their choices don’t always reflect their deepest values.

It’s not common sense to think so, but the cafeteria is a classroom, and the curriculum of Cafeteria 101 is as important as any other class at college, reflecting earlier socialization in food rules and dining etiquette, affluence and the ideology of choice, entitlement and expectations, work and class, ignorance and indifference. Students digest these lessons as much as they digest the food, learning a lot when they think they’re not learning: lessons about culture and nature that carry over into the rest of life. But there’s still more to discover before the final exam.