CAS mashed potatoes: Food waste, miniature horses, and the limits of campus dining services
On Thursday, Feb. 23 at exactly 1:44 p.m., Campus Auxiliary Services sent all students their semi-regular “Food for Thought” email, detailing their monthly specials, menu changes, dining hall updates, and a few fun facts about CAS dining. One such fun fact is a harrowing declaration, delivering in a flippant two lines: “CAS serves over 200lbs of mashed potatoes each week! You can find mashed potatoes on the menu rotation at every unit, either at lunch or dinner.”
For reference, 200 pounds is equivalent to one miniature horse, or two very miniature miniature horses. Over the course of a month, that amounts to 800 pounds of mashed potatoes, or four miniature horses, or eight very miniature miniature horses.
Doubling down on their tale of potato noir, this email was coupled with a post from the official Geneseo CAS Instagram page, detailing verbatim the same “fun fact” about mashed potato quantity, along with this chilling call to action: “Today, you can enjoy an infamous Mashed Potato Bowl at Mary Jemisin.”
You read that correctly. Straight from the horse’s mouth, clear as can be, published in casual yet official means, CAS has deduced that their potatoes—all 200 pounds of them—are infamous. Now, any student who relies on the respective dining halls for their nutritional intake will know all too well the infamy of their culinary offerings; but to see it right under our noses, declared alongside such a smug plea to consume this potato-ridden villainy, is a whole other animal—a miniature horse, or eight of them.
All snark aside, these strange breadcrumbs of boastful announcements related to the amount of food offered on campus—not the quality—present more urgent questions about the promotion of excess, not only in campus dining services, but in America at large. According to Feeding America, 119 billion pounds of food go to waste in the United States each year. For reference (using real, non-horse statistics), that is approximately 358 pounds per American citizen per year. While CAS’ 800 monthly pounds of mashed potatoes are of course not the leading culprit of food excess in America, their bombastic claims about the amount of food they serve—food that, if student input is taken into account for, often goes uneaten—act as metonymy for the larger issues at hand of food insecurity and waste.
At this point, countless articles have been written about the severe limitations of CAS’ dining offerings, from their arbitrary hours (the campus Starbucks is the only dining facility open past 9 p.m.), questionable nutritional value, and limited options for those with dietary restrictions, among a slew of other problems. These problems are certainly worth noting, but I feel that the potato issue stems even further than mere dissatisfaction; while these potatoes may not seem like the most pressing issue at hand, CAS’ lack of journalistic integrity in their boldfaced assertion not of their food’s quality, but of its sheer quantity, comes at the expense of those who have to subsist on their lackluster dining services—students who have been writing emails, signing petitions, and vocalizing their concerns with food quality and safety.
The mashed potatoes, then, represent more than just an absurd quantity and an ironic typo—they represent the consistent thwarting of student comfort in favor of quick fixes and lofty press statements.
Thumbnail photo via Wikimedia Commons