For All It's Worth

My school cafeteria is insane.

You would think that, once you leave the ranks of pub ed behind you for an illustrious career in higher education, that infamously bad school food would be obliterated. And it is. Kind of. It's nothing you'd find in even a low-key restaurant, but the creamed corn isn't going to crawl across your plate and start dissolving your mashed potatoes with its free-flowing digestive juices.

Sadly, the increase in quality is paid for by a decrease in sanity. A significant portion of my student union underwent reconstruction over the summer, and is now officially one clichéd line away from Sparta.

Like most student unions, ours is composed of a hodgepodge of cafeteria-style eateries and a number of brand name take-out places, such as Pizza Hut and Chik-fil-A. (It also houses one of our campus' three Starbucks.) The cafeteria is the main part that underwent renovation, though the Starbucks moved out of the sandwich shop and assimilated the Mexican place no one ate at--so now we have a Starbucks with confetti-esque wallpaper and the lingering smell of burnt refried beans, though that's neither here nor there. Similarly, the "main" cafeteria and the "takeout" cafeteria fused, becoming a singular bloated amoeba of horror. For some bizarre reason, our delightful Board of Bewildering Students decided that something was inherently wrong with our cafeteria. So they gave it a complete overhaul. Now, it is no longer a true cafeteria, but something our school pamphlets refer to as a "diner-style" eatery. This means that, instead of grabbing a plate and pilling random quantities of limp fettuccini, marinara sauce, and pudding on a plate, you pick out pre-prepared meals from beneath a heat lamp. There are several "stations" set up for this purpose.

I'm sure this sounds nice in theory, but it makes dining incredibly inconvenient. You can no longer pick and choose your food, compiling your dinner as you go--it's their way or the stairway. (Specifically, the one that opens out in front of the aforementioned Pizza Hut, which thankfully hasn't changed much, so you can still be in an out in as long as it takes for the pokey employees to finish making the breadsticks.) Quite puzzlingly, they've also abolished the salad bar, which seems quite a curious thing to do for an institution that puts standees on every table proclaiming the merits of a balanced diet yet only grudgingly provides fresh fruit. And you can forget about veggies--unless you like yours boiled to a gummy, rubbery consistency. You may have to resort, as I do, to munching baby carrots out of a bag like potato chips. The only food they serve with any consistency are pizza, hamburgers, and hot dogs. Everything else is either an American-Chinese-Food recipe of the day, something with mushrooms in it (which I'm no great fan of) or sandwiches, which, although custom made, you must wait in an impossibly long line for. I've defaulted to the grilled cheese many a time. On the rare opportunity that they have one of their "lunch specials" available--which is usually just another type of toasted bread product--I pounce. The day they served plain cheese ravioli with canned spaghetti sauce, I practically wept. Largely because they only gave me three pillows of ravioli.

The only institution in that destitute cafeteria that remains comfortably familiar is the cereal bar, which is consistently well-stocked with various varieties of processed, fruit-and-sugar-flavored grain. If all else fails, there are always Frosted Flakes and milk. And yet... The most puzzling addition yet has taken up its fungal residence there.

Naturally, the cereal dispensers are right next to the milk machines. These are ridiculously confusing and awkward contraptions, but they seem to have been there for years, so I assume most students have come to put up with them. Near the beginning of the year, a sign appeared on one of the rectangular chrome devices.

"For your convenience, soy milk is available inside the dispenser."

As an English major, I am both confused and intrigued.

Both dispensers bear this signet, yet neither one actually contains soy milk. Soy milk is generally described as having a taste that resides somewhere between "a handful of dirt" and "two handfuls of dirt," and the milk inside these machines is rather lacking in that gamy flavor. So where is this mythical soy milk? I would like to claim that the issue with the sign lies in ambiguous structure, as that's generally the problem when sentences are unclear, but I am an English major, and I know better. The real issue lies within its frame of reference.

The beauty of language is that it is abstract. We can refer to things outside of ourselves with ease. We can replace entire phrases and clauses with pronouns and still retain all of our meaning, provided there is context for it. In writing, this context usually comes from the previous sentences. In everyday speech, we can point and gesture to our its and hes and shes, and we can use ambiguous determiners in the presence of multiple objects because we can indicate which we mean. A sign, gifted with neither fingers nor hands, has no such faculty. Thus the simple, everyday word the turns this sign into an enigma.
I admit it would be more humorous in its grammatical uncertainty if the sign said "Inside a dispenser" without bothering to mention which one, but the "the" is no less mystifying. There are a total of three milk dispensers that I know of in the cafeteria, making the "the" ambiguous. If the signs are meant to refer to any milk machine outside of themselves, then any determiner at all really isn't a good fit for the sentence. If the sign were meant to refer to the machine it's on, then a good "This dispenser" would suffice. But if the sign is meant to refer to something else--serving as a deterrent for eager vegans, I suppose--then it really ought to be giving directions in order to avoid ambiguity.

In order to be fair to the sign, I checked the labels over the machine's spigots to see if any of them were marked "soy." One machine bears skim milk and 2%, the other two contain both of those and chocolate. No clear indication, then, that any of these machines was a soy-bearing load. I sampled from each to try to determine their origins by taste. All seemed to be firmly bovine in origin. Somehow, I think I would be less incensed if the sign were a complete lie than if it were merely bad at giving directions.

Of course, it is entirely possible that Advanced Soy Milk Technologies have been put in place here, and the beany brew has been rendered invisible next to the real thing. I have never suffered from lactose intolerance, so my stomach does not serve as an accurate barometer in these issues. I may have been pouring legume juice over my cereal for weeks now and been completely unaware of it. If so, I commend the soy milk manufacturers for making it taste more like milk and less like soy; I was able to enjoy my pastrami on rye last week with a tall pale glass of lactic acid, and if I was in fact consuming raw liquid tofu, my taste buds are none the wiser.
Of course, spooning soggy Froot Loops into my mouth, I am inclined to wonder where in fact the real Fountain of Soy Milk lies. Is it hidden behind a counter some where? Must you request it specially, as they do for the omelets they serve at breakfast? Is it part of the secret menu at In-N-Out? If it doesn't exist, why the signs? To give disenchanted lact-ints a second lease on dairy? To convince the vegans that they have not completely forgotten them? Or are they merely there, as a strongly suspect, to confuse the living daylights out of English majors such as myself?

But if that is their purpose, they are awfully subtle. Today's Dinner Special sign commits a far more egregious error, certain to cause ringing in the ears of this university's collective English department.

"Chicken Pot Pie's"

Oh, how I weep.