Colleges used to exist to feed
student’s minds.
Not so much anymore. Sadly,
examples of that truism are legion. And now we can add one more: college
students across the fruited plain are making highly specific and exceedingly
picky demands as regards their food choices. The University of Texas-Austin
hired a second campus dietician for the current semester,
because the first, Lindsay Wilson, “was overwhelmed with requests to craft
personalized menus for picky eaters, to debunk urban myths about the contents
of food the school serves and to recommend healthier lifestyle choices,”
according to the Wall Street Journal. Ms. Wilson remarked: “I have had a little
pushback from some very feisty vegans.”
The University of Houston spent
thousands of dollars just to build two hydroponic grow towers to cultivate cilantro and oregano indoors, sans soil.
Not to be outdone, UCLA installed aeroponic
grow towers on the roof of the school’s Bruin Plate dining hall to grow plants
with just mist. “Thyme, butter lettuce and microgreens are flourishing” there
states the Journal. Aristotle must be proud.
The student’s demands have put
enormous pressure on school chefs and dining halls. But Hannah Logan, a senior
at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, opines: “If you’re not eating good
things, how do they expect your brain to grow?”
A freshman at the University of
Colorado-Boulder, an aspiring neuroscientist, stated: “For me to see myself
going to a school, I also had to see myself being able to eat there. I see a
huge correlation between what I eat and how I think.” Apparently lending
validity to this statement, a 2016 survey of over 1,200 UMass-Amherst scholars
revealed that 70% said the quality of the school’s food was an important factor in their decision to
attend the institution. Which is why the school upped its spending on local and sustainably grown foods to
$4.9 million through June of this
year, an 81% increase over 2016.
Yale has a 1-acre hybrid farm where
students thresh wheat and grind grain. Flour from the farm is baked into pizzas
served at weekly food symposiums cleverly called “Knead 2 Know.” Higher
learning at its finest! Jeremy Oldfield, Yale’s manager of field academics,
avers: “It gives our pizzas certain nutty and incredibly light grain notes that
are so special.” Everyone knows how
healthy pizzas are!
“Nutty and incredibly light” is, in
fact, an apt description of the academic regimen on campuses these days.
Some say the genesis of the rapidly
changing climate regarding campus cuisine was the “free-trade coffee movement”
in which Virginia Tech students demanded more free-trade coffee in 2008. In
response, dining-services head Ted Faulkner promptly flew to Nicaragua, where
he picked beans at an organic, “bird-friendly” coffee estate. That estate now
supplies the school. Since then, Virginia Tech has added a churrascaria (?), a
gelateria (?), and a sushi bar, among other dining options. “You’ve got to keep
pace with their expectations,” exclaimed Faulkner.
Faulkner said that, during a
student dining committee meeting this past spring, a student complained that
the school’s pancake syrup was too bland. The dining staff then summoned the
student- and other student leaders- to a kitchen to sample French toast
sticks…and a lineup of 13 different
syrups from which to choose. They were asked to rank the syrups. The winner
was sweet and flavorful, with a “good dipping and pouring consistency,”
proclaimed the student who lodged the shocking complaint against the formerly utterly
unacceptably bland pancake syrup. Here,
here! There should be strict federal
guidelines regulating the dipping and pouring consistency of school’s syrups.
Has anyone stopped to think that
maybe dealing with the horrors of “bland pancake syrup” isn’t the most
effective way to prepare kids for the rigors and “unfairness” of the real world
they’ll enter after college?
As many know, Ivy League schools
have long held a reputation for having the best cilantro, while it has
traditionally been hard to beat a Pac Ten school for tofu-inspired dishes. And
LSU has attracted many of its students because of its splendid Duck a l’
Orange. So, it is no longer enough to have, say, a great journalism program, or
a top-shelf medical college anymore, experts state. In fact, academics in general
are widely considered outré by millennials- and their professors. Similarly, possessing
great sports teams won’t do the trick in today’s campus climate. It is no
longer even acceptable for an institution to simply have excellent
opportunities and outlets for social justice warriors (SJW), even if the school
has the most and best equipped safe spaces. Haute- and healthy- Cuisine is the order of the day. If, say, Notre Dame
wants to keep abreast of Stanford in recruiting the best and the brightest- or
the biggest and the fastest for that matter- it now must spend millions of
dollars annually to upgrade its food service. The days of bag lunches or
Salisbury steak are long gone, as are the days when fast food restaurants and
“greasy spoons” would dominate campus perimeters.
Cicero can’t hold a candle to
cilantro any longer. Rhetoric is no match for rhubarb. Locally-sourced, of
course! Ingesting oregano trumps teaching about the Oregon Trail. Everyone is
worried about gluten, not too many about Putin.
Is this pathetic First World
inability to prioritize the final nail in the coffin for “higher education?”
It’s certainly food for thought.
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