In “All You Can Eat,” Emerson Prentice ’29 educates readers about campus dining, in hopes of leading Stanford students to appreciate the food and team that feeds them around the clock.
On Thursday, Nov. 27, Americans across the country indulged in a Thanksgiving dinner. In some households, it might have started at noon; in others, at 6 p.m. It might have included ham or turkey. It might have been vegetarian. Regardless, on this special day of appreciation, the convergence of friend groups and families at tables far and wide united the American populace.
But at Stanford, we don’t need Thanksgiving to practice this type of synchronized eating. Whether at Arrillaga Family Dining Commons or Casper Dining, students engage in very similar eating habits every day. We swipe our ID cards during the same time frames; dine on the same soup and burgers. We are put on equal ground as our classmates, led to sit next to peers — known and unknown — and consume relatively similar meals.
Our participation in these universal habits strengthens the Farm’s community: on any given day, any student can partake in a campus-wide conversation about a delicious dessert or the decoration of a dining hall. “What’d you think of the asparagus?” “Did you see they have cornbread at Lakeside?” How remarkable is it that a random peer you pass on campus has probably eaten much like you that day? And through this simple act, you have created an unintentional soul tie with this person, just as you might be linked to a sibling who knows the taste of your mother’s meatloaf.
By following similar eating patterns, we unknowingly build lifelong shared culinary memories. But the cuisine of Stanford doesn’t just connect us to one another — it bonds us to ourselves. When the holiday season comes around and you smell the peppermint wafting off a warm chocolate peppermint cookie or the thyme on the Thanksgiving turkey roasting in the oven, you are instantly transported back to holidays from years past. Suddenly, you embody those prior versions of yourself that indulged in these same treats, filled with holiday warmth.
Who knows? Maybe one day, as you delight in some carne asada tacos, you’ll be reminded of the Oaxacan-inspired flavors of Stern Dining. The memories we build here are inseparable from the flavors embedded within. Years from now, food could be the thing to bring you back to your sacred time on this campus.
Students’ acclimation to Stanford’s cuisine also reflects a crucial part of the college experience: growth. When students arrive on campus, we are taken away from our traditional dining practices, separated from the favorite flavors we may have known our entire lives. While that can feel vulnerable and scary, it also opens incredible new doors of gustation. As we develop unexpected academic interests and join unfamiliar but exciting clubs, novel tastes also cement themselves in our souls — the richness of coconut milk in chicken curry, the punch of pepper in ropa vieja, the bite of nigella on roasted carrots. Perhaps we don’t know it now, but someday we’ll realize how expanding our diets was part of this maturation and transformation.
What we eat plays a role in what we consider to be our culture and heritage. From the taste of a dish alone, you can often identify which groups and regions it’s associated with. At Stanford, with these common eating practices, we have developed our own food culture, here and now. From the blackened salmon to the tasty tofu scramble, the food is recognizable and distinctly Stanford — distinctly us.
So, next time you take a bite of Stanford dining, among friends or alone, pause and take a moment to reflect. This food does more than sustain us; it has and will continue to define our time here. Even if we don’t want, need or expect it to, it means something to us.