Tufts Blogs

It is nearing the end of the semester; today I finished my last few classes and told some of my classmates that I looked forward to seeing them after winter break. Though finals are yet to come, and ever-stressful for me, I can’t help but feel a sense of finality that I have finished a semester living an academic reality that is so radically different from yet so seamlessly continuous with what I experienced in high school that I had to write about it. Yet, I also don’t want this to fall into the trope of an overly generalizing, wafting blog post about an ambiguous period of time. To restrict my scope and make the article a little more interesting, I want to focus my analysis of the semester around food I’ve eaten on campus, and general takeaways I associate with them.

Burrito from Churro - This was the only food item available after my often late-ending Thursday night chemistry labs that would satisfy my ravenous hunger (all that thinking about the Lewis dot structures for the compounds and reactions we studied makes you really lose some good energy!). I would enter Hodgdon (“Hodge”, as we Tufts students like to call it)l, walk to the “Churro” stand, which serves Mexican food, and order a burrito of chicken, lettuce, pico de gallo, cheese, guacamole, and whatever else I wanted to put. This would fit inside one of my meal swipes; so it was an affordable meal, and I savored it. Every time I had this meal this semester, I was reminded that I would often be tight on time: I wouldn’t always have time to do things in a “refined” or finessed way, because as I have discussed before, in college you largely own your own time, and a part of my prioritization scheme relative to my class schedule meant that eating wasn’t always what I thought was the most important. And yet, when I did need to eat, I wasn’t deprived of a good meal: though I likely would not have enjoyed eating in such a hurry back home or in high school, the fact that I was doing so because I got to set my own priorities made the feeling rewarding in a way. 

Chocolate Chip Cookies - The DeWick-MacPhie dining hall varies its options quite a bit depending on when you choose to eat there, but the presence of one item is near constant: its desert cookies. DeWick’s cookies, mainly served as either chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, or fully chocolate variants are scrumptious. I ate mostly the chocolate chip cookies, and they’re wonderful: the chocolate chips melt in your mouth, but the cookies themselves are crunchy and baked to perfection, providing the perfect combination of textures. I usually enjoyed cookies at DeWick when I had more time rather than less, they were usually a “cherry” on top of a larger meal that I had just enjoyed. While some nights in college are busy because of the workload and personal time management choices, the fact that I had time to eat these cookies for many other nights reminds me of how much freedom I have relative to high school: instead of stress-eating them while finishing off last-minute work, some nights I can just grab a cookie and go read that magazine issue I always wanted to, or write articles. This semester, I’ve unlearned a bit of my “anti-hobby” habit from high school: cookies remind me to be relaxed.

Halal Grilled Chicken Breast - Ah, the eternal bane of any self-respecting Tufts student, DeWick’s Halal Grilled Chicken Breast. The only food in the world which happens to be dry as a bone in certain areas yet uncomfortably moist in others. And yet, despite all the complaining everyone does about it, it happens to be one of the most-enjoyed items in the dining hall: the queue to grab it is long, and it is almost exclusively chomped down by students who might as well look like hungry wolves. Why wouldn’t it be? It is, after all, seasoned (the seasoning varies slightly depending on the day, some days it is lemon-tinged, other days it has more specific regional spices), nutritious, and easy to eat in bulk (individual pieces aren’t so heavy). Its fame (or infame) as a dish means that an awareness of its properties is practically ubiquitous in the student body: it creates a bond between the community who eats it. Many of my friends, who I’ve met in completely different contexts, grab completely different food from me but the Halal Grilled Chicken Breast, which we line up for together. This is a dish that, for me, is a symbol of unity within the community: I am reminded that I’m surrounded by peers who share similar experiences to me daily, with which I can empathize.