For those of you who were blissfully unaware, University Dining mandates that all first-entry students living on campus purchase a meal plan. This policy is an absurd example of the University’s progressively more intensive regulation of our daily lives.
Food, acting as a social lubricant, plays an important part of our culture and our ability to be human beings. The hearth is the essence of the home. College students are often seen gathering at coffee shops or pizza places. As free humans, it ought to be our right to determine the manner in which we eat, for it is the way that we live.
However, Modern institutions, in an effort to discipline increasingly larger populations, exert greater control over the way we live our lives. Michel Foucault refers to this tendency as “biopower” defined as “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations.” The regulation of nutrition is such an example of this perverted power.
Throughout K-12 schooling, we were told when, what, where and how to eat. In elementary school, we were told to stand in nice, pretty, straight lines to walk to the cafegymatorium. Progressively, we were given more freedom; or rather, less was taken away. For example, in my high school, upperclassmen were granted the privilege to eat off-campus because God forbid a human being have the ability to walk wherever and nourish their self as they please.
In my younger and more vulnerable years, college represented freedom, a release from the shackles of K-12. But yet, even in 2016, universities still act in place of parents and meddle in the way we live.
But we aren’t children anymore, and we shouldn’t be treated as such.
We deserve the option to eat as we please. However, students who live on campus have this ability suppressed. Residence halls (minus the apartment layout ones) are constructed on the assumption that residents will make use of University Dining’s facilities; hence Sullivan Residence Hall’s adjacency to Fountain Dining Hall.
Therefore, halls aren’t set up to allow people to cook on their own. Anyone who has visited the public kitchens of the residence halls knows of their mediocre state. On-campus residents are so infantilized that we aren’t trusted to have hot plates or toasters in our own rooms and have to check out pots and pans from the front desk, at many halls.
The administration naturally presumes that we are nasty, childish buffoons incapable of handling our freedom. Thus, University Dining assumes the duty and “feeds the Pack” rather than offering an opportunity for food education or constructing a grocery store to allow people easier access to ingredients. Viewed through an economic lens, it doesn’t make sense for University Dining/Housing to educate students on how to cook as supporting an alternate competitive route subverts the institution’s market share. Why would the fishmonger teach their customer how to fish?
The primary justification for the existence of the policy’s mandate is that paying off debts and ensuring low prices via economies of scale necessitates a guaranteed number of students on meal plans. Other universities also make use of this policy; but then again, just because other people do an action doesn’t make it right.
At the core though, any institution predicated on mandatory subscription ought to have its manipulative tactics critically examined. Instead, University Dining should reform to be more convivial in the sense that participation is entirely voluntary without coercion and it works to amplify rather than restrict the freedom of students.
