My spouse and I have been trying our hand at cooking for the last few months, now that we finally have a kitchen big enough to allow for multiple tasks to occur at the same time. For a recent endeavor, we tried making french onion soup, a dish which I had heard of but never actually tried, either making it or eating it. I consider myself a fan of onions, generally speaking, so a dish made primarily of onions seemed like it was destined to turn out.
It wasn’t, though. It turned out terrible. We have our guesses why, but whatever the reason was, we ended up with a vaguely onion-y soup that tasted more like the broth than any of the other ingredients, and a genuine sense of disappointment. Maybe that’s just what french onion soup is supposed to be, but we haven’t had the heart to look it up and find out. At least the cheesy bread was good.
Still, the failure of this particular dish was an exception to the pattern as of late. The success rate of our cooking has been good overall, and reflecting on our previous dishes in the wake of this one mishap eventually led to thinking back to my eating habits in college.
Living in the dorms during freshman and sophomore year meant that I had to feed myself, as an adult, for the first time, which I think is pretty typical. But I was not especially well prepared for that sudden change in culinary responsibility, nor was I especially mentally well during those first two years of college, the combination of which meant that my relationship with meals quickly deteriorated. Again, I think this is not altogether out of the ordinary—the stereotype of college students eating ramen in their dorms certainly points to a commonality here.
But as far as I can tell, the saving grace of college food experiences is that they are so often communal. Food at the dining hall is shared with floormates, trips to Taco Bell are shared with friends, and even dorm-cooked ramen bowls are perhaps shared with your roommate.
Unfortunately, though, none of these experiences marked those first two years of college for me. I spent my first year mostly avoiding new and terrifying social experiences, and I even lived roommate-less for my second year—an outcome that turned out to have devastating consequences on my mental health. I ate meals at the dining hall, almost always by myself, and I made trips to Taco Bell, almost always by myself, and starting on a new medication with appetite suppression as a side effect meant that if I missed the (insultingly early) kairos for the dining hall, I would often just… not eat anything that night.
By the time I was finally beginning to break out of my shell and make friends, in my third year, the pandemic hit, and I was once again relegated to social solitude, this time externally inflicted. At that point, I began having meals with my family again, but the damage had already been done. My eating habits were awful, and I was extremely accustomed to eating in solitude.
Thinking back to that time now, it’s obvious to me that those two things are not actually so distinct from each other. There is something mutually detrimental about eating poorly and eating alone, and, conversely, something deeply connected about eating well and eating with other people. Personally, I’m just now coming around to this lesson, in 2023, after realizing that if I had to choose between a mediocre french onion soup that I spent two hours on but that I cooked and ate together with my spouse, and a meal of three corn dogs with spicy mayo that I ate for my first meal at 11am, alone, in the dining hall, I would choose the former every time (though I do miss those corn dogs sometimes).
In other words, I have been slowly re-discovering for the last few years what humans everywhere in the world have known well for millenia: that eating food in community is essential, both for the food and for the community. Cooking and sharing meals with your loved ones adds a helpful organizational element, yes, but it’s also important in a spiritual sense—you share the effort, you share the time, you share the table, and you share the food. It’s a simple ritual, but it’s a meaningful one.
Of course, if I had realized all this back in 2018, maybe I would have attended more floor dinners. But I’m here now, chopping vegetables and everything like a whole adult, and we made a delicious chili just the other day, so I think it managed to work itself out, one way or another.
Philip Rienstra (‘21) majored in writing and music and has plans to pursue a career in publishing. They are a recovering music snob, a fruit juice enthusiast, and a big fan of the enneagram. They’re currently living in St. Paul with their spouse, Heidi.
