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.
The Agriculture of the Cafeteria
The cafeteria is where most students encounter agriculture. Even at land grant universities, which were designed to offer civic instruction in farming, most students don’t learn about farming in classes anymore, and the major crop on campus is typically the lawn—harvested weekly and then discarded. Few students at any college grow their own food, relying instead on the work of farmers, fishers, fruit growers, and ranchers in other places.
Eating in the college cafeteria, students depend on a complex of agricultural institutions that have developed over time. When Joe and Jo College devour the contents of their plates, they eat food that is delivered to them systematically. The cafeteria is just one small part of a food system, which is an intellectual and institutional infrastructure for the production, processing, distribution, marketing, preparation, and consumption of food.
Systems of Food
The system starts with agriculture, which is, simply put, an ecological strategy whereby Homo sapiens replaces native ecosystems with specialized fields in order to increase food supplies. A farm is, in ecological terms, a structured habitat in which humans take advantage of solar energy and the photosynthesis of plants to feed their families and others, and sometimes to feed livestock, which in turn feed humans. And farming works. In the last ten thousand years, human population has increased from a few million to more than six billion.
The American food system developed slowly, evolving from a wide variety of Native American methods practiced at the time of European contact to the full-fledged industrial agriculture of the present.
The first American food revolution came in the Columbian Exchange. When Columbus arrived in the Americas he didn’t “discover” the world that Indians already knew perfectly well. But he and his successors did find foodstuffs that they sent back to Europe, with astounding culinary and cultural effects. Potatoes sailed to Europe where they became a staple of the peasant classes. In Russia, they were distilled into vodka. In Ireland, they supported the population until the Great Famine, when the lack of food drove millions of Irish immigrants to North America. Tomatoes also traveled to Europe, where they became an essential part of southern Italian cuisine. Any college student who eats a pizza topped with tomato sauce is eating one of the results of this first food revolution.7
On this side of the Atlantic, the Columbian Exchange created a whole new world. It brought new crops like wheat, oats, and barley, and a barnyard full of domesticated animals—cattle, pigs, goats, sheep, horses, and burros. European colonists adopted maize, a native plant, and added it to their inventory of grains. More importantly, they also brought their assumptions about agriculture (that land wasn’t improved or productive unless it was under constant cultivation) and private property (that land could be owned by individuals instead of shared by tribes). Most devastatingly, they brought disease, which decimated Native American populations and ecological traditions. The result was a radical remaking of the American landscape, from cultivated wildness to cultivated domestication.8
The second American food revolution came in the nineteenth century, with the transportation revolution and the development of national and international markets for commodities like corn, wheat, beef, and pork. Chicago became the hub of a new food system that included ranches in the West, farms in the Midwest, grain elevators along everextending railroad lines, stockyards and slaughtering plants in the city, and a Board of Trade that stimulated the flows of commodities from farm to fork. For consumers, the result was a diet of great variety, delivered via steamship and steam engine from the four corners of the world. By the end of the nineteenth century, as historian William Cronon suggests, “The Iowa farm family who raised corn for cattle purchased from Wyoming and who lived in a farmhouse made of
