Institutionalized

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.