by The Fearless Cook
So the other day one of my housemates walked into the kitchen. This is the housemate who’s rarely home for dinner and almost never shops or cooks; the one who has something like four million points left.
"I just bulk-ordered $300 worth of food," she said. "I think I may have ordered fifteen pounds of cereal."
It has occurred to me many times-pretty much whenever I go grocery shopping with a friend who’s on a tight budget-that the Wesleyan meal plan is turning me into a completely moronic consumer. I don’t look at food prices. I don’t buy only things that I know I will eat before they go bad. Why should I? We have a meal plan, after all, that renders the purchase of fifteen pounds of cereal just about entirely irrelevant, something you can do almost without noticing.
The truly great thing here is that buying fifteen pounds of cereal, even by accident, is far from the stupidest thing that can be done with points. (Unless, of course, you loathe cereal, which my friend does not.) I mean, even those microwave omelet dishes begin to look pretty good when you’re presented with a choice of losing your unspent points or buying huge amounts of slightly peculiar things. Who knows? Maybe eggs taste really good when you microwave them. And even though you’ve eaten breakfast on enough airplanes to know that they don’t taste like anything at all and have the texture of that starch-based styrofoam, you buy it, just to see. (NOTE: I have not done this. I’ve just been tempted.)
This is fascinating. Because what consumer capitalism does is to get us to buy ever-increasing piles of stuff by creating in us the "need" for all of it, so that, for instance, next time I go to the mall I may well discover that I really need another pair of shoes, even though I already have a couple dozen pairs. And whereas I can put "need" in quotation marks when it’s the "need" for another pair of boots that consumer capitalist society has convinced me I have, those quotation marks have to disappear when I talk about the need that ARAMARK has instilled in me for a microwave omelet dish. Or something. Because if I don’t spend my points, they revert to a large capitalist institution. That’s bad.
So you buy something stupid. I admit to having done this, and I’m sure you’ve done it, too. What else can you do? I gave well over $100 worth of food to various food drives last year and I don’t see why this year should be any different. I’ll be eating Weshop pasta all summer. I still have no incentive to be a remotely intelligent consumer. So I have this idea that maybe ARAMARK should get other large corporations to pay it for training us into the habit of buying any shit that crosses our paths. Even though this wouldn’t benefit us directly, at least we wouldn’t have to keep hearing how, actually, ARAMARK barely makes any money off of us at all.
At this point, standard writing practice demands a conclusion. But it’s completely futile. I had a minor observation. I wrote it down. What am I going to do now; call for revolution? Revolution itself is not a bad idea, but I believe that the suggestion has been made several times, directed against both our meal plans and capitalism more generally.They’re still here. I can suggest that you not buy things you won’t use and give lots to food drives. Well, duh. If you needed me to suggest that, allow me to make another suggestion: kill yourself now. There's no need to go on.