free food guilt - are we all spoiled by the non-pizza events?

[abony holmes]

I don’t know how it works at other law schools, but at Berkeley Law we have some kind of presentation, reception, or law firm sponsored event every weekday (and occasionally on weekends). In fact, I seldom have to pay for lunch at school, and I can usually score a free dinner on days I spend late nights in the library.

The best thing about these free meals is the quality — in undergrad I was happy to get free pizza (the cheap kind, cheese only) and Diet Coke. At law school, most of us have developed such a sense of entitlement about the quality of our free food that groups have to advertise “Non-pizza Lunch Provided” to attract our distinguished taste.

Thanks to all this free food, I’ve gained about 10 pounds this year, but not for reasons that you may think. I have an almost maniacal obsession with not wasting food, so whenever I attend an event, I try to polish off whatever remains, or at the very least bring food home for another day (of course this strategy often backfires, as the next day I am at another event with more free food). I can’t shake the fact that there are starving people everywhere, while we trash perfectly good (and often gourmet) food on a daily basis.

Now that the price of food is skyrocketing, I feel even more food guilt than before. In fact, I had to turn off a Slate podcast on the “Agony of the Food Snob” because I couldn’t stomach the idea that the fortunate are suffering because of the increased price of Basque cheese.

Full disclosure: I have to admit that I’m a burgeoning food snob. I shop at Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, I spend hours reading the posts at Chow Hound, and I’ve even started documenting my efforts to visit all of the Bay Area’s 100 Best Restaurants. The fact that I’m a law student with limited funds means that the food snob’s agony hits me harder than most--I can only afford to be a food snob because my food budget is heavily subsidized by law school events.

Still, where do I get off feeling any self-pity about skyrocketing food prices?  What I should be doing (what maybe we all should be doing) is finding a way to shift some of my good free-food fortune to those less fortunate. I’m not saying I need to start shipping leftover lasagna to Ethiopia, but at the very least those of us with food-ordering power could find a way to donate some of our budget to local food banks, who are hit hard in times like this.

In the meantime, I’m increasing the scope of my one woman mission to not see food go to waste, even if it means I’ll spend a disproportionate amount of my loan money buying new, bigger clothes.

Comments

oh, berkeley is the BEST place to eat. so much good food, so little room in my tummy!