Recently, students at Oberlin College became outraged over what they deemed cultural appropriation in dishes served in the dining hall. Specifically, students protested the inauthenticity of Asian dishes. A student-written article regarding the issue lamented the “gross manipulation of traditional recipes.” It quoted one student who said, “When you’re cooking a country’s dish for other people, including ones who have never tried the original dish before, you’re also representing the meaning of the dish as well as its culture.”
While it is fair to complain about undercooked rice in your sushi or General Tso’s chicken that tastes nothing like any of the General Tso’s chicken you have ever had, protesting it as a legitimate offense is another issue. The poor cooking and ingredient substitutions pointed out by Oberlin students should sound familiar to University students. Our dining halls frequently serve similar imitations — food that is good but not great, and certainly not what you would call authentic. This is what students ought to expect. A dining hall is not a restaurant. College dining halls exist for one purpose: to feed students, and to do so on the budget they are given.
There are two possible solutions to the Oberlin students’ complaints. First, universities could hire chefs experienced in preparing all types of cuisine and stock their kitchens with high-quality, authentic ingredients. But this would put the already low-paid dining hall employees out of work and require a far larger budget, which may mean higher tuition rates. Second, dining halls could cease to serve any dish that they do not have the capacity to produce at the highest quality and in the most authentic fashion. Realistically, this would leave most university dining halls with a menu of hot dogs, cookies and boiled vegetables. Bad sushi is not cultural appropriation — it is a reality of a dining hall.
Bad dining hall food is an inconvenience. To deem it cultural appropriation takes away the legitimacy of the idea of cultural appropriation itself. When a bunch of white students dress up as Mexicans, wearing sombreros and wielding signs with slogans about smoking marijuana, that is offensive. That is an instance of stereotyping an entire race and mocking a culture. When your dining hall serves you some bad General Tso’s chicken, no one is mocking or attempting to imitate another culture — your dining hall is trying to make your chicken taste better. Dining halls do not claim to serve authentic international cuisine. If a poor attempt at fake Chinese food seems worth protesting to you, grab your picket signs and head straight to the nearest Panda Express. To be fair, universities ought to avoid advertising vast culinary cultural diversity in their dining halls if they are going to substitute the key ingredients, but this is an issue of false advertising, at most.
The problem with such ridiculous grounds for protest is that it takes power away from the very act of protesting. Understandably, the students’ complaints over cafeteria food have made them a laughing stock. One article on The Daily Beast, filed under the “Seriously?” section, called out the students for “[exploring] new frontiers in getting offended.” The article did not end with the dining hall issue — it went on to mock everything the students have protested recently, and therein lies the problem. Much of what young activists in the U.S. have to say is legitimate and important. This instance is the exception, not the rule. Students at any university, simply by the fact of being surrounded by like-minded peers and having the resources with which to think critically, have a unique platform from which to speak out and protest injustices. And there are certainly plenty of injustices to protest nowadays — police brutality, the gender wage gap and the simple fact that Donald Trump has received any votes, to name just a few. But when students with such a unique opportunity devote time and energy to the inauthenticity of what they ate for lunch, it makes a mockery of activism. It is what has led our generation to being labeled as fragile, oversensitive and too politically correct. If young people want the world to pay attention when we speak, we had better make sure we are talking about something important. There is too much at stake to waste time on frivolous matters like cafeteria food. If students choose to raise their voices in protest over bad sushi, sooner or later people are going to tune us out. This is a real danger when there are so many causes in the world worth fighting for, so many reasons that today’s young activists need to be heard.
Nora Walls is an Opinion columnist for The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at n.walls@cavalierdaily.com.
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