#3 - mystery food

We are being housed in a dorm on a small college campus. The men are on the first floor, the women on the second, and each person has their own room. Each room has two beds, two desks, a small refrigerator and an air-conditioning unit. The bathrooms are shared (one per sex) and there are laundry and kitchen facilities in the basement. The walls are cinderblock, the floors are vinyl, and the bathroom tile color pallet is cutting-edge 1973. At some point the facilities director got a bulk deal on two dozen rolls of forest-green floral wallpaper border and plastered it onto the walls of all the common rooms. The woman for whom the dorm is named gazes benevolently over the cramped lobby from behind her horn-rimmed glasses. No one keeps their door open to socialize and when someone cooks in the basement the bathrooms smell like chicken and macaroni.

The campus is grassy and spotted with trees and every day when I walk to breakfast I encounter half a dozen bunnies grazing in the morning shadows. They share the lawns with the sparrows, finches, robins and squirrels. The squirrels startle to their branches and the birds flit around singing and feeding their chirping nests. It’s so fucking picturesque I expect Snow White to burst out of the foliage at any moment, singing some soulful melody about the beauty of forest creatures or her hollow life as a single woman.

We are fed three meals per day during the week and left to fend for ourselves on weekends. Each meal is served in the Math Learning Center a short walk away from the dorm. Lunch and dinner include a salad of plain lettuce (though recently carrot slivers have made an appearance!), a fruit salad of melon and grapes, a mayonnaise-based pasta cold dish, and an assortment of hot food. It is a showcase of mediocrity. The fish and vegetables are always overcooked with the exception of the eggplant which has not yet been served in a manner conducive to consumption. The recipes are strange and bewildering. Dinner conversation centers around 1) identifying the meat, 2) identifying the combination of flavors, and 3) guessing the recipe’s country of origin (or what we believe the cook to believe to be the country of origin). Usually, meals include some sort of discernible theme such as “Mediterranean”, “BBQ”, or “Breakfast”. Lately, however, the cook staff seems to have strayed from this pattern. Last week we were served what were purported to be bean & rice burritos but what turned out to be wraps filled with a teriyaki sauce-drenched mixture of rice, beans, corn, cheese and tofu. One classmate’s burrito included couscous and carrot slices. These so-called ‘burritos’ were accompanied by sides of steamed cabbage, corned beef and boiled potatoes. This led us to wonder if 1) the cook was fucking with us, and 2) if there was any Latino presence in Wisconsin—certainly there wasn’t any working in the kitchen that day. If there was, the poor souls have surely lost all self-respect in addition to their sense of right and wrong.

Our mealtimes are 8 AM, 12 PM and 6 PM. I have never in my life eaten three meals per day unless the third fell somewhere beyond 10 PM. I feel as if I am constantly eating. Mostly I stick with salad and fruit because it is reliably free of sauce and salt. On weekends I grab one meal in town with classmates and eat the rest out of my mini-fridge—cheese, fruit, hummus, diet Dr. Pepper and crackers. There are few restaurants accessible from campus—lack-luster family dining and pizza joints. There is one Chinese restaurant downtown but after our encounter with ‘Mexican’ food in the cafeteria, we have thus far avoided it. Also, for the land of cows and cheese, Wisconsin’s cheeseburgers are severely disappointing.

On Saturday we ate in one restaurant, in the midst of a gaggle of middle-aged bikers. A caravan of Harley Davidsons lined the street out front and their riders filled the tables inside, drinking diet sodas and adjusting their leather vests. I watched one woman twirl a curl of her graying hair from beneath a skull-and-crossbones bandana and wondered what drives people to spend their retirement on fringe-festooned clothing and obnoxiously loud motor vehicles. I understand the appeal of open road and fresh towns, but this does not sufficiently explain the phenomenon. No, it is something else entirely that drives people to tour the country dressed like morose rodeo clowns. I resent their sense of entitlement—that they now spend their lives riding from pristine countryside to charming town, annoying everyone they encounter with their raucous engines. And I resent the fact that by the time I can afford to retire gas will be too expensive for me to do the same and electric motorcycles will make no more noise than a bicycle. Perhaps by that time one will be able to download a variety of loud engine noises from iTunes in order to compensate for the convenience of clean and quiet vehicles. I certainly hope so. This is America after all.

Update: The melon is starting to invade the other food platters—at a recent lunch the vegetarian mélange included mushrooms, apples, honeydew melon and cantaloupe. Bewildered and fearful that the fruit would continue to run amok and mount a hostile takeover of our entire culinary world, one classmate fired off an emailed complaint to the program director. The next day the melon had vanished, replaced by a bowl of tiny, spotted green apples. The people rejoiced.