00:00:41.400Do you want to walk me through what you know so far?
00:00:43.600Yeah, my memory of this is relatively hazy.
00:00:46.620But what I recall is that a student at Oberlin complained about cafeteria Bon Mi.
00:00:54.980And I can't remember the format that they complained about it in.
00:00:57.880but eventually this complaint trickled its way into right-wing media. And so what was a pretty
00:01:07.100anodyne complaint about the quality of food at a cafeteria gets sort of laundered into a
00:01:16.360meta discourse about whiny students complaining about woke stuff.
00:01:22.360All of these college campus controversies are so much easier to understand as human behavior when you hear them in the order in which they happened.
00:01:32.340So four years after this controversy, we finally get a retelling from the beginning from the Columbia Journalism Review of like what actually happened.
00:01:42.060So we don't actually find this out until four years later.
00:01:44.080The beginning of this story was basically a journalism professor at Oberlin was speaking
00:01:49.640to one of his journalism students and she was pitching a story about how like the Vietnamese1.00
00:01:53.640food in the cafeteria like sucks ass.1.00
00:01:56.300The Chinese kids say the Chinese food sucks.1.00
00:01:58.500The Japanese kids say the Japanese food sucks.0.99
00:02:00.380And this is just like a pretty common gripe among international students.1.00
00:02:03.880I bet the American food sucks too.0.97
00:02:10.940It's also an essential part of the student journalist experience. So the professor eventually is like, well, why don't you like write this up as a story? And like, this is so much student journalism is just like the lowest stakes, nothing burger ass thing. But it's like as a student journalist, you got to fill like 16 pages every week of the student newspaper.
00:02:31.540My first article at My Student Newspaper was about seasonal allergies.
00:02:36.400There wasn't any like new information or anything.
00:02:39.680It was literally just like, it's April.
00:02:41.480And so I remember like walking around the grassy areas of campus and just asking people
00:02:59.940That like that was basically the whole story, just like allergies exist. And one thing I really I like I deeply empathize with the people writing these stories, because it's like, this is student journalism, you're kind of practicing, right? You're learning what it's like to talk to random people, you're learning what it's like to package anecdotes and information into some sort of coherent structure.
00:03:19.920so this student basically just like she trundles off to the cafeteria to like write up the fact
00:03:27.160that international students have complaints about the international food and so i am going to send
00:03:32.660you the first four paragraphs of her story okay deep win a college first year from vietnam jumped
00:03:39.600with excitement at the site of vietnamese food on stevenson dining hall's menu at orientation this
00:03:44.560year craving vietnamese comfort food win rushed to the food station with high hopes what she got
00:03:49.900however, was a total disappointment. The traditional banh mi Vietnamese sandwich that
00:03:55.020Stevenson Dining Hall promised turned out to be a cheap imitation of the East Asian dish.
00:03:59.960Instead of a crispy baguette with grilled pork, pate, pickled vegetables, and fresh herbs,
00:04:04.740the sandwich used ciabatta bread, pulled pork, and coleslaw. I do feel like it was undersold in
00:04:10.160the press, the extent to which these students were correct about the food being shitties.0.99
00:04:15.480It was ridiculous, Wynne said. How could they just throw out something completely different0.97
00:04:19.960and label it as another country's traditional food? Wynne added that Bon Appetit, the food
00:04:23.960service management company contracted by Oberlin College, has a history of blurring the line
00:04:28.060between culinary diversity and cultural appropriation by modifying the recipes
00:04:31.940without respect for certain Asian countries' cuisines. This uninformed representation of
00:04:36.740cultural dishes has been noted by a multitude of students, many of who have expressed concern
00:04:42.280over the gross manipulation of traditional recipes.
00:06:51.100This is probably the journalist wandering around the cafeteria for like an hour or two with a notebook and like sitting down next to students and being like, hey, you look like a foreign exchange student. Do you mind if I like talk to you for a little bit, like ask you about the food? These people did not contact the media.
00:07:07.840Right. I also think that there's I don't know if this person was sort of prompted to go in this direction by the student journalist.
00:07:15.720Right. Right. Right. But like like you said, these are necessarily low stakes issues.
00:07:21.080And the student journalist might have an interest in making them seem a little higher stakes than they are.
00:07:27.620Right. Like perhaps this isn't just that the cafeteria food sucks.
00:07:32.140Maybe there's an amount of cultural insensitivity baked into this, too.0.83
00:07:35.480Right. And that's just sort of like some kid trying to make their story interesting. Yeah. It's not like something that represents a widespread viewpoint on campus or anything like that.
00:07:46.020So what's also amazing to me is the rest of this story is actually super constructive. So the journalist interviews a kid from Malaysia who's like, I actually think the food's fine. And then she talks to people from the sort of the cultural clubs on campus.
00:08:00.580You know, there's like the Chinese American club and there's like the Filipino club and stuff.
00:08:04.800And a lot of them are like, yeah, we'd love to meet with the cafeteria and like talk about the way to present our dishes or maybe the way to prepare them or what to call them.
00:08:12.000And the food director is like, yeah, we'd love to talk more with students about like how we can represent their cuisines better.
00:08:18.380and so after this article runs this article runs in november of 2015 in december we then get a
00:08:25.760follow-up article about the meeting that took place between various cultural clubs on campus
00:08:30.640and the food director and like it seems like everybody just kind of sat down like adults
00:08:35.040it seems like they came to some sort of compromise where they like wouldn't call it a bon me anymore
00:08:40.060yeah well maybe don't call it a bon me you can call it like bon me inspired or something like
00:08:45.060that. But ultimately, it seems like, okay, there's this fairly minor gripe among the students. And
00:08:51.240then the adults are like, that's a fair point. Let's talk about it. And then they address it.
00:08:57.020It's like, right, right. This is just all very normal stuff. No one's melting down. No one is
00:09:04.340protesting anything. Not a national news story so far. Don't really see why I need to have known
00:09:10.400about this at all. There's also, as a total coincidence, there is a group of black students0.93
00:09:17.720who are actually protesting the cafeteria. Apparently there's like a residence hall for
00:09:22.320black students on the Oberlin campus. And there's been a process of updating the food to make it
00:09:28.160more culturally appropriate. This is like something that's been going on for a while.
00:09:31.680And I guess the effort was not very good. So at some point, the black students write an open0.70
00:09:37.560letter to the food service company with a bunch of demands. There's food stuff on there. They're0.52
00:09:42.560like, you know, a lot of the food involves cream and like we don't really use cream in a lot of
00:09:46.940our cooking. Like we'd like you to have more consultation about like what kinds of foods
00:09:52.020are appropriate. And then there's also stuff like we want better working conditions and we want
00:09:58.020better procurement practices. There's like this petition open letter thing that has a bunch of
00:10:03.600complaints on it. That's like kind of an ongoing issue. And there's one article in the Oberlin
00:10:09.160student newspaper that says that they did, in fact, stage a protest outside of this one
00:10:14.920residence hall for black students over the conditions of the food and the fact that the
00:10:19.860company nor the university had responded to this open letter. So it's not totally clear how many
00:10:25.740students protested. I remember when I was on campus, you'd see these protests of like three
00:10:30.100people like outside of various like campus things. So it's not it's not clear like how widespread
00:10:36.280this was. But it is true that at some point, some Oberlin students did have a protest involving
00:10:43.480food. Right. Geared towards the food service company. Yes. So then six weeks goes by. And
00:10:49.740then we get the first national media coverage. Hell yeah. Do you want to guess what what the
00:10:55.940headline is? It appears in the New York Post in case that's a hint. I don't think I can put my
00:11:00.080in the mind space of a new york post headline writer so just tell me all right i'm sending you0.96
00:11:04.280a screen grab it's it's a masterpiece holy shit i know oh the layers students at lena dunham's0.95
00:11:18.000college offended by lack of fried chicken oh man so one of the complaints in this open letter from0.97
00:11:27.280the black students was like culturally appropriate foods such as fried chicken should be served more
00:11:33.240often this was like one of many bullet points right the new york post plucks that out is like0.99
00:11:38.140the central concern of these students yeah of course and also just throws fucking lena dunham1.00
00:11:43.280in there for no reason the lean there's like a an insert with lena dunham's face in the corner0.89
00:11:49.580So the opening paragraph, of course, leans into just like the most incendiary aspects of this.
00:11:58.640So it says, students at an ultra liberal Ohio college are in an uproar over the fried chicken, sushi and Vietnamese sandwiches served in the school cafeteria, complaining the dishes are insensitive and culturally inappropriate.
00:12:13.560Gastronomically correct students at Oberlin College, alma mater of Lena Dunham, are filling
00:12:18.500the school newspaper with complaints and demanding meetings with campus dining officials and
00:14:29.420This story is hardly all there is to Oberlin.
00:14:32.320It's an outlying story about a small number of students plucked by the tabloid most adept at trolling its readers from the stream of campus news.
00:14:39.180There are dissenters at the school, and students at many campuses often complain about food in overwrought ways.
00:15:44.440Right. Like he went back to the student newspaper, which like a lot of the right wing media didn't do.
00:15:48.900Right. And he still manages to frame this as like, what if what if there's a real problem underneath this?
00:15:54.780He knows enough and has read enough to to realize that a caveat is necessary.
00:15:59.960Right. Yes. He has seen the disparity between what actually happened and the coverage of it such that he is like, OK, well, I can't just credulously write about this.
00:16:10.840I need to give the caveat up top that this isn't really of note.
00:16:54.840They alienated like the four people that potentially read even halfway through the story to get to the Japanese student.
00:17:00.900Am I alienating millions of people with my thought on the dining room food at Overland College?
00:17:06.980Is is there something I mean, you know, I don't even I don't even have more to say about this.
00:17:11.860This is just that's just like unreal language to use about a student's comment to a student newspaper journalist alienating millions of people.
00:17:22.100He's like, in fairness, Lena Dunham is very annoying.
00:17:25.300But then Friedersdorf quotes, I'm not kidding, a commenter on Rod Dreyer's blog calling this a cynical power play on the part of the students.
00:17:35.000Yes. Connor then says, if this is a cynical power play on some level, its effectiveness
00:17:41.040cannot be denied. And then he quotes from this article about how they sat down with the dining
00:17:45.840director and how they came up with like this nice compromise plan. We play the national media like
00:17:50.500a fiddle. The banh mi sandwiches at Oberlin are now called banh mi inspired. Like are people just
00:17:59.760not supposed to make complaints about things that they want to change? Right. After this little
00:18:04.580paragraph. He says the less cynical explanation is that these students really do feel culturally
00:18:10.220disrespected by low wage dining hall staff making do with suboptimal ingredients. Oh, my God. Oh,
00:18:16.560the less cynical explanation is that like the food sucks. Right. You're right, Connor. We should0.96
00:18:20.540entertain the possibility that everyone here was just talking about the food sucking in a completely
00:18:27.000normal way. Thank you for inviting me to consider what is by far the most likely explanation.
00:18:32.580You could be having this conversation by leading with that, because I think that is a fair critique.
00:18:38.780Sure. You're looking at someone who's making almost no money and is being told, like, make this right.
00:18:45.040Some cuisine they're totally unfamiliar with. But Connor is just using it as a cudgel to be like you insensitive pieces of shit.1.00
00:18:54.880And remember, the petition the black students circulated had better wages and working conditions for cafeteria workers on it.1.00
00:19:02.300Right. So they are actually concerned about it. Yes. What Conor is doing is the same thing that
00:19:06.980conservatives always do, which is to when the left makes a complaint, point at another plight
00:19:14.120and be like, well, you're ignoring that that person's plight. Right. Not because the conservatives
00:19:18.560actually give a shit or have any interest in addressing that person's plight, but just so0.98
00:19:24.980that they can play marginalized people against each other. Exactly. And be able to talk about0.98
00:19:29.900how liberals and leftists don't actually care about this stuff, which they use as justification
00:19:37.760for the fact that they don't care either.
00:19:40.380It's always this is like such a common complaint about anybody pushing for social change.
00:19:44.120Is it like they don't actually want this?
00:19:46.180And it's kind of it's it's very funny to apply it to a case like this where it's like
00:19:51.760they're eating in the cafeteria three times a day.