Land of Lime

Seth Mayer, a vegetarian philosophy concentrator at the University of Chicago, has a funny piece in last week’s Chicago Maroon on trying to survive on free food for a week. He did inspire me to share my own thoughts on free lunch.

Make no mistake. Free food has great value in every student’s life. This isn’t merely about saving money. The real saving though accrues in the form of time and effort. With some strategic planning, one could go from a class to a free food event and reinvigorated by food and wine, one could go to the library to study / discuss Aristotle and Foucault with fellow students or translate some Sanskrit verses or solve a math problem. If you haven’t taken part in any of these rituals, I pity you and you will not understand how empowering free food can be. How else can we debate the points of intersections of dignity and subalternity? Long life especially as a poor, and always hungry, graduate student desperately requires some expertise in finding free food events and consuming free food.

Which, I submit, is an art in itself. When we enter the University, we inherit accumulated wisdom on the following free food events:

1. Talks and conferences where some food and wine is served. Food for the mind is always appreciated but so is food for the body. Even at the University of Chicago, free food is a big draw for a talk.
2. Graduate and undergraduate social mixers, including some Friday afternoon departmental social hours.
3. Assorted parties sponsored by some entity within the school throughout the year, either welcoming students or celebrating in spring another year wasted in school.
4. Various activist and religious groups, which often throw in some food to attract a larger audience or by the generosity of their hearts.
5. Cafes, which distribute leftovers at the end of the day.

Let us begin with the last category. At these cafes, deploying quickness that a good basketball player would possess (especially a deceptively quick first step) and strategies that I had witnessed bus and train commuters had perfected in India, students would rush to take grab left over bagels and doughnuts. I have spent many a Friday and Saturday evenings at the Regenstein café, witnessing this Olympian event; properly nourished, one could stay in the library until ten, instead of heading out for dinner at 8. Or one could adjourn to the pub, where one’s money could be better spent on beer instead of greasy food, which I must admit is also good for the soul. Those are the calculations that always govern our lives.

Other events too require some planning and abundant patience. While the mixers and parties sponsored by the University or Division(s) are usually well stocked and would satisfy all the hungry souls, that may not be true for Student government organized study breaks and such events. In both cases, one will have to possess the fortitude to get through long queues. At other events, interminably long and often boring talks is the price one pays to get some goodies. Receptions at big ticket lectures are usually quite safe. So are Career and Placement Services (CAPS), especially big company recruitment events, where invariably loads and loads of good food is served. Pity, such events occur only in the beginning of the academic year. The price to pay at such events are the stories that we need to concoct for the benefit of recruiters. As I can attest from personal experience, that makes for an entertaining afternoon.

Anyways, it helps to check out the Events page of the University home page before planning for the day; both the quality of the speaker and the reputation of the center sponsoring the talk are relevant. Still some talks provide nourishment for the mind and others for the body. The trick is to balance both. Go to any event organized by the Franke Institute of Humanities and the Nicholson Center for British Studies. As Seth points out Franke particularly has class. It always has had class, ever since the founding director Arjun Appadurai institutionalized the most important of South Indian virtues: great hospitality, which invariably meant fantastic food. Biological Sciences Division is usually not on par, is very hierarchical and good at kicking out interlopers. Philosophy and Social Thought aren’t known for their hospitality. In fact, I have heard of ID cards being demanded by philosophers, before they part with their cheese burgers. Socrates would be quite unhappy at the this turn Philosophy has taken!

But the best food invariably was served by and for the folks who paid the most, promised to earn the most and eventually donate the most to their alma mater: folks at the graduate school of business. Before GSB moved to their new building, they would hold all their receptions and recruiting events around Stuart Hall. Which meant we could crash those events. Although they didn’t like interlopers, after a few years, we developed the confidence of insiders and walked through tents, picking up whatever goodies that were being served for the classy folks of GSB. Nodding to an occasional familiar face encountered in the sqaush courts always helped. Alas, the new GSB premises excludes all outsiders.

I must desist from sharing some more rather subversive details on free lunches for the time being. I am not ready to face the wrath of University bureaucracy, just yet. But I have come to believe that the University too is invested in educating and encouraging students in acts of pillaging. It spends an enormous amount of money on receptions and food, which in a rational world it would have given directly to students in the form of more funding or medical insurance. But then redistribution is a dirty word in capitalist societies. Yet ironically, Univ. of Chicago is a big bureaucracy, if it is anything.

So in lieu of my own comments, let me reproduce Seth’s conclusions:

Meditations—In retrospect, I learned some important lessons that I can pass on to you, intrepid reader. First of all, you can drink free wine every night if you play your cards right. If you want to get free food, you have to be ready to sign up to receive annoying e-mails for events you won’t attend (unless you’re sure that free food will be there, of course).

In addition, you can eat little else beyond cheese and crackers every day and still avoid getting scurvy. And if you plan on living off of free food, always have a backup plan, because you never know if you’ll be let down by whatever institute, center, or group is trying to make you learn things outside of class.

After attending many events, I’ve had a great week learning about a multitude of subjects and, well, learning a lot about myself. For instance, I’ve learned that I lack the dignity to worry about what living off of free food for a week says about my character. And finding things like that out is what college is all about, isn’t it?

Well, here at the University of Chicago, the source of dignity is not in being able to feed oneself but in shooting breeze with or on Foucault. If someone supplies, cheese and wine towards that end, who are we to complain!