By Leah Finnegan
The phalanx of Tupperware-clad students crowded around the microwave in Brooklyn College’s cafeteria either doesn’t notice or tries to ignore what’s scrawled on the wall above the machine, with an arrow pointing downward: “It’s very nasty.”
The cafeteria is technically titled the Metropolitan Food Café, and is decorated in shades of the ‘80s – black accents abound. Most everything edible there has some element of beige: khaki-colored pizza crust, off-white rice and beans, ecru pasta salad punctuated with square jewels of red pepper. Individually-packaged slices of carrot layer cake have both the color and plushness of a foam mattress pad. Archetypal pieces of fried chicken are tinted a radioactive shade of orange only because of a heat lamp’s protective glow.
Some diners choose to avoid the cafeteria’s colorless offerings and bring their own lunches. An older man sits by himself at a table loaded with books and binders. He alternates between taking gloppy spoonfuls of strawberry yogurt with one hand and bites of an apple wrapped in foil with the other. He drinks Seagram’s Ginger Ale from a can.
Behind him, a man in a black skullcap eats beef with his fingers from Tupperware. He uses a spoon to eat the accompanying rice, moving the grains around the container several times before taking a bite. He drinks orange Powerade.
A young woman behind the apple man takes timid bites of an oatmeal raisin cookie while reading a thick textbook. She has two types of tea on her table, iced and hot. She wears a sweatsuit.
Plastics are the cafeteria’s lifeblood. All food items are served on, or come encased in, plastic. At minimum, a table has three elements of plastic on it: a bottle full of liquid, a plate of food and utensils. Students dining alone at least keep their cell phones on their tables, which are plastic. The chairs are plastic. Salisbury Steak Wellington, the featured dish of the day, resembles plastic play-food found in a child’s miniature kitchen.
On the back wall of the dining area is an impressionistic mural of students sitting in the college’s main quad, its iconic buildings in the background. They have no faces. The women sitting in front of the mural suck daintily on chicken bones until every last shred of meat is gone.
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