I've been dining institutionally for the past four years, and for most of that time also living in institutional housing. Not to mean that I have been institutionalized (though sometimes I wonder if I should be); by 'institutional dining' I refer to food served up in cookhouses, staff canteens, and dining halls. Likewise with institutional housing: barracks and dorms. What defines institutional dining as an experience? How is a dining hall a special place, compared to other kinds of places where one can eat? While musing on this point I was thinking about school canteens: do they count as institutional food? After all one is likewise obliged to be commensal, messing together (both in the sense of consuming one's viands and exasperating the custodial staff) under some protective roof. Given this common trait, the act of eating together in a big space with people from a given institution is not what defines the experience of institutional dining. The true answer lies in the relationships of power and patronage at work when we are served our meals.
What I finally concluded truly defines an institutional dining experience lies in who prepares and serves up the food. In a canteen, with its multiple vendors, one has the pick of whom to patronize. A dining hall, by contrast, even if there is a wide and diverse buffet spread to pick from, has really only one kitchen, one group of cooks, one master mind and deciding hand behind the menu. The principles of competition do not apply. Instead of playing patron to the vendor, the roles are reversed and the consumer becomes patronized by the all-powerful hidden power that dispenses food, drink, and sustenance. From having a buyer's dignity of choice (however limited), to being beholden to an anonymous kitchen in order to stave off starvation, how great a gulf! The cornucopia laid out on the tables is not a vision of plenty, it is instead an act of disdain: take as much or as little of this food as you want, for we hold the keys to it and your present plenty is at our whim. More fruit? Less homogenized mush? A choice of beverages other than colored sugar water? Fill out this slip with your thoughts, and drop it into the forbidding maw of the feedback box and we shall retire to contemplate your respectful memorial.
So this is the great lie we have to recognize: that plenty is prosperity. The hand that feeds is also the hand that takes away, otherwise why would we be warned against biting it? In our mortal condition we are powerless to fight or contend against the various powers that hold our lives in the balance, some of which inspire reverential worship, and others fearsome loathing. So it is also with the quality of food in different dining halls. My greater point, though, is that the sooner one realizes the truth about one's situation, the easier it is to come to terms with it, and the more urgently one pushes oneself to find a real job, live in a real home, and eat TV dinners heated in a microwave like real people do.
12 July 2009
06 July 2009
Not My Party
Yesterday was July 4, my dear sister's birthday. Coincidentally, it also happens to be Independence Day in a country some of you may know as the United States. Woods Hole, the village that I'm in for this summer, has a charming little parade down the two blocks of streets that constitute the center of the Hole. It has some of the trappings that you'd expect from a Fourth of July parade - the Stars and Stripes, a marching band (drum and fife, and a random trumpeter who later got attacked by a giant mosquito, but more on that later), and watermelon - but the highlights are the floats and displays put on by the students and faculty of the various courses at the Marine Biological Laboratory. They're biology-themed, very campy, and very nerdy, as one would expect (a video of last year's parade to prove my point).
The Embryology course did their classic gastrulation dance, dressed up in three colors to represent the three embryonic germ layers. The neurobiologists had big floats of their favorite organisms, which this year were a blue lobster and a three-eyed mutant frog. More diverse were the favorite microbes represented by the microbiologists, who to a large extent had a different costume each (giant Vibrio and a giant host squid, two really cute kids who were tottering along in bacteriophage costumes with big capsid caps, a very fetching anaerobic methane oxidizing consortium, etc.) though there were some symbiotes in the crowd, too. Several giant parasites (including two huge mosquitoes) hovered around while immunoglobulins and other components of the host immunity swatted them away, and the cell physiologists did something too arcane for me to interpret, though it involved aggressive popping of balloons and lots of water bombs. And those same water bombs (and water guns, which are the only weapons that Massachusetts doesn't strictly regulate) were involved in warfare between the different contingents - the mutant frog got totally spattered, the microbes and parasites fought back with high-powered squirt guns, and general chaos ensued in the streets. Aside from the courses, there were other groups too: local residents, the Children's School of Science group which went as Darwins and the Finches, and assorted independents, including myself as a (hastily assembled) sea squirt, the result of a (similarly hasty) commitment made the night before.
That was all great fun. Later in the evening, as the sun set, I walked around hoping to see fireworks. The town of Falmouth, I knew, has a great display every year at the beach, and I was hoping to catch a glimpse from the shore here. Eventually I followed the sounds of explosions and found my way to the private neighborhood just some way off from my dorm. They were having their own small fireworks party at their shared beach. Not being a resident, I could not go in after dusk, but walking down a side-road to find a better vantage point, I ended up standing in front of someone's driveway, joining a Slavic family that was there also to watch the show from the opposite side of the cove. It was brilliant, to see the pyrotechnics from so close. Each of the sparkles and whizzles was clear and sharp, and the noise was thrilling. Being downwind on a gusty evening, I imagined that I could smell the peppery spent gunpowder. It was also a lonely experience. There were children shouting and running about - the glowing dots of their sparklers gave away their positions in the darkness. Out to sea on the horizon, there was an even bigger show of fireworks on the mainland, but from the distance it was reduced to minuscule sprays of silent, glittering pixels. It was then that I knew that this was not my party. It was mine to watch but not to revel in, looking on from across the bay as someone else sets the charges off to light up the sky, briefly.
The Embryology course did their classic gastrulation dance, dressed up in three colors to represent the three embryonic germ layers. The neurobiologists had big floats of their favorite organisms, which this year were a blue lobster and a three-eyed mutant frog. More diverse were the favorite microbes represented by the microbiologists, who to a large extent had a different costume each (giant Vibrio and a giant host squid, two really cute kids who were tottering along in bacteriophage costumes with big capsid caps, a very fetching anaerobic methane oxidizing consortium, etc.) though there were some symbiotes in the crowd, too. Several giant parasites (including two huge mosquitoes) hovered around while immunoglobulins and other components of the host immunity swatted them away, and the cell physiologists did something too arcane for me to interpret, though it involved aggressive popping of balloons and lots of water bombs. And those same water bombs (and water guns, which are the only weapons that Massachusetts doesn't strictly regulate) were involved in warfare between the different contingents - the mutant frog got totally spattered, the microbes and parasites fought back with high-powered squirt guns, and general chaos ensued in the streets. Aside from the courses, there were other groups too: local residents, the Children's School of Science group which went as Darwins and the Finches, and assorted independents, including myself as a (hastily assembled) sea squirt, the result of a (similarly hasty) commitment made the night before.
That was all great fun. Later in the evening, as the sun set, I walked around hoping to see fireworks. The town of Falmouth, I knew, has a great display every year at the beach, and I was hoping to catch a glimpse from the shore here. Eventually I followed the sounds of explosions and found my way to the private neighborhood just some way off from my dorm. They were having their own small fireworks party at their shared beach. Not being a resident, I could not go in after dusk, but walking down a side-road to find a better vantage point, I ended up standing in front of someone's driveway, joining a Slavic family that was there also to watch the show from the opposite side of the cove. It was brilliant, to see the pyrotechnics from so close. Each of the sparkles and whizzles was clear and sharp, and the noise was thrilling. Being downwind on a gusty evening, I imagined that I could smell the peppery spent gunpowder. It was also a lonely experience. There were children shouting and running about - the glowing dots of their sparklers gave away their positions in the darkness. Out to sea on the horizon, there was an even bigger show of fireworks on the mainland, but from the distance it was reduced to minuscule sprays of silent, glittering pixels. It was then that I knew that this was not my party. It was mine to watch but not to revel in, looking on from across the bay as someone else sets the charges off to light up the sky, briefly.
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