You are where you eat

Someone once said, “You are what you eat.” If the saying holds true, then I am some strange mix of chocolate milk, bacon burgers and Almond Joys. Though this would make a terrific and humorous cure to any identity crisis life might someday throw at me, I’m pretty confident that this saying is complete rubbish, at least to the extent that it can inform personal identity.

At Princeton, the saying is revised, as if by a natural translation, and gains unlikely import: You are not what, but where you eat.

Is that to say that your eating status — a ridiculous term, if I’ve ever heard one — defines your campus experience? My hopes and all my faculties for reason are aligned in thinking that they don’t. But defining or not, where we choose to eat our meals surely rests among the most significant decisions regarding our social lives here.

The importance of where we eat is something Jason Kaplan must have forgotten, or at least overlooked, when he recently argued on this page that the University should require students to join four-year residential colleges to provide “a safety net” for those who don’t find comfort in eating clubs or co-ops.

At the risk of oversimplifying his proposal, Kaplan wants to institute an imitation of Yale’s system at Princeton. Instead of the six large residential colleges we have now, Kaplan would have us create numerous small residential clusters. Each cluster, he writes, would be comprised of 300–500 students of all classes. Eating options would remain the same so that for the first two years you would eat in one of the dining halls and as an upperclassman, you could choose among eating clubs, co-ops or going independent.

What troubles me about Kaplan’s plan is not merely the restriction that it places on upperclassmen living, but his assumption that we can automatically create communities by throwing upperclassman into a residential college. The reason residential-college systems work (Yale being the best example) is that the members of each college eat in the same dining halls.

Think about the friends you have made in your residential college. I will go out on a limb, and argue that the majority of friendships that underclassmen make from within their residential colleges begin in the dining halls. For underclassmen, who cannot join clubs or co-ops, the residential-college system fosters friendships around salad bars. But for upperclassmen, who generally take their meals outside of the residential college system (both the current one in place and the one proposed by Kaplan), the college dining halls offer very little — only the inconvenience and frustration of not being able to live with their closest friends.

If I could travel back in time before the formation of the eating clubs, I might very well have argued for a system like the one Kaplan now suggests (essentially, a revision of the Yale system). But I can’t travel back in time and can only see Princeton for what it is. As long as the eating clubs exist at Princeton, most upperclassmen will avoid residential dining halls. Their lack of participation renders the four-year residential-college system ineffectual since it deprives the socially disenfranchised of the safety net Kaplan calls for.

Though I think his proposal is misguided, his column enunciates a feeling that I share myself: a quintessential sophomore anxiety. As club initiations continue throughout this week, sophomores are reminded that they have just made what appears to be the most significant social or dining decision they will make at Princeton. For those whom the system has somehow forgotten, whether by means of hosings or financial incapacities or by mere preference, I can sympathize with Kaplan’s call for a social safety net.

Going independent is not the end of the world, but can enhance the sense of social alienation of those who may need a safety net. This is a hole in our system, and Kaplan is right to identify the need for a safety net — only wrong on how to establish it.

In the end, I know that deciding where to eat will not define our Princeton experience. But, then, I also know that few other questions are as significant in the fostering of campus community.

Peter Zakin is a sophomore from New York, N.Y. He can be reached at pzakin@princeton.edu.