A fairly unscientific survey on students’ qualms regarding our university yields the glaring lack of places to grab cheap, fresh food on campus. Of course, the situation has starkly improved since my first year: we now enjoy the blessings of the Hot Yam (every Thursday at the International Student Centre) and Hart House lunches (every other Wednesdays at the Great Hall) between lines from Homer and Principles of Mathematics. But sadly, unless you live a short walk from campus and are able to make a daily pilgrimage back to your kitchen around lunch-time, you are stuck with sad, stale Second Cup muffins, or cold, lonely slices of Pizza Pizza pizza.
As I mentioned in my previous article, I am spending these remaining few weeks assessing U of T’s green-ness and identifying areas that could use some pick-me-ups. Though “food” is not an official category in the sustainability report card, I believe it as important as any old transportation issue or shareholder concern, if not closer to student needs. As the wildly successful food writer Michael Pollan so emphatically puts it, food is the one thing that brings us together, the one activity that is common to us all despite culture, demographic, religion, and class. The causal relationship between nutrition and productivity has been proven time and time again in medical journals yet other stories, not the dearth of savoury meals on campus, dominate the news.
Here, the dominance of major chains has led every morsel of public space to be occupied by a Second Cup or a Starbucks, while independent operations remain only where patrons have cared enough to show support (Diablos is the only one that comes to mind).
Some argue that for time-pressed students, these ready-made snacks and meals are not only convenient, but necessary. This seems to exaggerate the complexities of preparing a home-made meal. Just yesterday, a few friends of mine decided to get together for dinner. One made candied yam, which she had picked up from a farmer’s market earlier that day. She also chose to boil up some handsome-looking kale. I decided to make a quinoa salad with avocados and bell pepper. Another brought samosas and chickpea paste from a previous family dinner. And in our leisurely cooking—stopping ever so often to divulge more gossip and howl with laughter—it did not take us longer than 45 minutes to prepare the whole meal. In the end, we had protein (quinoa), greens (kale), and starch (yam), and tupperware full of leftovers.
It’s terribly easy to fall into the diet of overpriced sandwiches wrapped in withering lettuce or committing the ultimate sin of eating from the Chinese food trucks just outside of Robarts (those MSG sirens). These advances are particularly difficult to thwart when your days involve rushing from one lecture hall to another library cubicle, not to mention impending midterms, and the terrible month of March that lies between us and spring.
But winter cooking will assuredly bring you surprising amounts of serendipitous joy. This is the season for roasting beets until they are molten magenta; the season for onions brown, white, yellow, and red. Squash is in vogue. So are parsnips, potatoes, rhubarb, and that ugly cousin of beets, rutabaga. This year’s TED Prize winner, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, announced his wish to transform the way we perceive our food, and the way we feed ourselves. He insists that we’ve been slowly killing our communities with the fast-paced, fast-food lifestyle that leaves kids unable to identify a tomato from a potato.
I reckon everyone at the University of Toronto is fully capable of discerning a tomato from a potato, yet this knowledge has not been put to good use. Perhaps instead of complaining about there being no proper food to eat on campus or growing complacent and caving, it makes more sense to take matters into our own hands and into our own kitchens.
Maybe, during your first week back from Reading Week, you might choose to pack your own lunch. And maybe, if you have a nice enough kitchen, you might have friends over for a cook-off. And I assure you, in-between peeling those mushrooms and glazing those zucchinis, conversation will inevitably flow into ideas worth discussing. It is these personal relationships forged while breaking bread that will serve as the mainstay of any environmental activism that is to come.
To help you through, the Huffington Post’s Green section is hosting a “Week of Eating In Challenge.” This week-long experiment of cooking your own food runs from February 22 to 28. Sign up is available on the Green page of their website.
