Whenever I reflect on my days in elementary school thru to high school, cafeteria food sticks out to me. Especially the lunch plates that they served us on. There was always a little spot for a carton of milk, an entrée, creamed spinach or some other untouchable vegetable, and a roll. Everything had a neat little spot and this first struck me as strange when I was at one of my parents’ dinner parties.
I was piling my mom’s delicious food onto a disposable Dixie plate and I realized that the sections were not accommodated to fit this Indian meal. I had salad but I also had raita, a yogurt dish that you eat to dull down the spice, with nowhere to be put. I was at a loss as to where to place the dal, which is to be used as a kind of gravy for the chicken birayni. Oh! And then there was some naan.
After my neurotic food episode at my parents dinner party, I went back to school and noticed the way all of the food items fit into the empty lunch plate slots as neatly as they were able to be broken up into the food groups. I noticed similar patterns when I went to restaurants such as Boston Market that fitted take out food into sectioned plates along with a corn muffin. And, then there was nutrition class where they taught us that food ought to be consumed in portions allotted by the food pyramid, another solid food organization figure that contained sections.
I can’t say that I’ve consciously felt ill at ease about my discovery all these years, but after reading the excerpt from Joel Denker’s book The World on a Plate that was assigned for class, it is good to know that someone else noticed. Denker relates the need to pigeonhole food items as an American concept reminiscent of the early nineteenth century when immigrant homes in the United States habitually held cooking classes to educate the foreign women on how to cook an American meal. The classes were all a part of the paternal behavior that instructed the new arrivals that the best way to conduct their lives was the American way. The cooking rules taught the immigrants that many of their native dishes (i.e. mixed dishes such as chicken biryani, which is a combination of rice and chicken!) were not conducive to proper digestion. In fact the best way to serve a meal was to separate the contents out into a starch, protein, and vegetable (i.e. mashed potatoes, a piece of chicken, and boiled broccoli).
After 18 years of school cafeteria food I can tell you that the menu has not changed much. Considering the amount of cross acculturation in New York City you would expect the school food to have reformed. And speaking of change, it is difficult to section off most non-nineteenth century American dishes. If that is not a convincing enough reason to get rid of those lunch trays, over the years we have learned that the food pyramid is not nutritionally sound. This is ominous of other forms of solid food organization figures breaking down.
