Catering for the best

I bet you didn’t know there is a university caterers’ organisation called TUCO (a great acronym for those of us who are Breaking Bad fans – one of the most extraordinary and mindlessly violent characters was called Tuco). Well, there is. Actually, this doesn’t surprise me; the only thing that surprises me is that, until a few days ago, I had never heard of it. Because catering is right at the heart of people’s university experience.

For myself, I remember very little about the quality and quantity of food I ate as a student; somehow the food wasn’t as important as other things, including drink. However, what I do remember is that food, or catering, were issues which once they were raised were guaranteed to produce heated argument, and with a bit of luck militant confrontation with the university authorities. And some of the causes were odd: on one occasion (in 1975 I think) we were willing to go to the wall in defence of the continued availability of burgers, beans and chips in the student cafeteria, a particular offering of food that should have been banned on health grounds rather than protected through militant action. A few years later, when I was a lecturer, I recall being at a general meeting at the university in which senior officers were having to announce a whole series of cuts because of dramatic reductions in government funding; in the discussion that followed the student representatives demanded to know (as their only question) what the impact would be on catering.

We shouldn’t laugh. Food is important, from the necessary provision of nutrition to the social networking that often happens when we eat. If we believe (as I do) that university is about more than classroom learning, or indeed classroom teaching, then we should aim to make eating on the campus a positive experience. Much of that is to do with providing choice and quality, and making it as affordable as is possible. But universities need to realise that catering is not an unimportant sideshow, and that presentation can be as important as the actual food substance. Overall, what can be more important than the experiences of the senses when encountering food, in stimulating company?

What is required therefore is a catering operation that values and is excited by food and understands its significance in building a scholarly community.

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