Food and Socio-economic Status

Food is an excellent lens into life at Wellesley. What we eat and how we eat it tells a lot about who we are. When you decide to eat a bag of chips alone in your room while studying late at night, that choice speaks to your own preference in taste and the accessibility of a cheap snack. When you gather with your friends in the dining hall, where you sit and what you each eat can show how you interact as a group. The same concept is true for looking at food in the past.

This page focuses on how food broadly can be used to understand socio-economic status at Wellesley based on evidence from the College Hall Dig and the Wellesley College Archives. Our subpages deal with the way student taste influenced the food, how food was used to build community across social classes, and the cost that community had. In all of these, food is the lens through which we see the socioeconomics of Wellesley's past.

Food

What exactly did the students eat anyway? Heavily influenced by Wellesley's New England palate and their own lavish standards at home, seafood and meats seemed to take a huge portion in the diet of students. This is reflected in the foody finds from the College Hall dig. 

The types of food favoured by Wellesley students is a reflection of their elevated status and refined tastes. Besides their own cheeky, private canned snacks, the foods offered by the college and their way of serving it upholds this image of class and sophistication. Below we will explore how the methods of serving this food contributed to the preppy Wellesley image. 

In contrast with the plain white plates of today, there were dishes specifically for Wellesley. The coloring is the signature Wellesley white and blue. On this one plate, the college is put on a delicate ribbon on the middle. It makes identity of the college tied to this fine dining experience. 

The dining room of College Hall projected an image of sophistication. Together, all students dined in a more fine manner. As they shared meals at these tables, they were also sharing ideas about what it meant to be at Wellesley. The message here, supported by the material the college provided for them to eat with, was that Wellesley was a place of wealth and higher society, where all students dined like proper women.

The dining hall at College Hall created an image of a Wellesley where every student had a certain level of wealth, made of part of fine dining. But on students on their own show a wider range of socio-economic statuses in their personal preferences. In public, they all ate off fancy plates at well-set tables. In private, they drank tea and ate sardines, bought chocolates and deviled ham. The diversity of the social and economic statuses of students and the way that it was expressed in food is explored further in the subpages.