St. Olaf College, whose food is currently ranked in Best Campus Food by Princeton Review, offers a diversity of food in terms of nationality. While Tortilla (a station for Mexican food) and Pasta are quite consistent, Home and Bowl lines are the sources of surprise to students and visitors with new dishes from all over the world, including but not limited to China, Vietnam, Thailand, Korea, Italy, etc. Despite all of the cooks' effort, more than once I have heard my friends complain that the tastes of these dishes are not right. It is a fake taste. A fake diversity.
It would be easy to embrace this position. St. Olaf creates its image as an inclusive and global campus. Despite the fact that the College has taken various measures to support the multicultural community, there is still a long way to reach such a community. This can be shown through the size of the majority in multicultural clubs, its number of attendants in each multicultural events, or the demography of alumni still in contact. Accordingly, food can be counted as another failure of the College in its way to create its ideal environment.
However, I believe that Bon Appetit, the company in charge of the Cafeteria, is doing a great job, given the following factors.
I am a Vietnamese international student. During my time at Saint Olaf College, I have had a chance to try "Vietnamese" dishes that I have never come up to during my 18 years in Vietnam. After giving this issue some thoughts, however, I come up with the question of how to determine the originality of a dish. Let's start with the food cooked by my family. It will be different from that same food made by my neighbor- yet both have made Vietnamese food. In a larger scale, the same dish in different regions of a country may have different taste. Is it fair then when one can tolerate this difference but not the difference made by a foreign cook? I believe cooking should be received like an art, where the cook, regardless of his or her nationality, can show his or her personal perception on a specific dish.
Secondly, everyone knows that in some cases, special ingredients makes a dish special. Similar to how a different kind of apple can make an apple pie have a different taste, even raw ingredients from a different country may lead to a different taste in a dish. If we try to stick to the original taste (if we ever know which taste is original), the adoption of a diversity of food will pose economic and nutritional problems. Bon Appetit chose its philosophy statement as "Eat locally" for a reason: food from far away costs huge amounts of money to deliver and loses freshness and nutrition in its delivery. One may oppose this by saying foreign restaurants are still able to provide original foreign food with the same freshness and nutrition. My response: that is why they are restaurants and not a cafeteria, man.
The problem with the diversity of food at St. Olaf presents the universal problem of pluralism in the United States, of the "true" and "original" essence of a race, religion, or nation and the complication of putting them in a local context. Maybe we should spend five seconds considering these factors before talking or acting on diversity.
