Foodways

Food as a community has been an overarching trend throughout Wellesley’s history, while sustainability more recently emerged as a concern.  College Hall featured centralized dining, where everyone ate in the same place and at the same time. Now, Wellesley’s multiple dining halls form a more delocalized system, but community building can still be organized around meals. Most Wellesley students live on campus, and either eat in the dining halls or cook in dorm kitchens with others.  In both of these locations, efforts to promote sustainable practices include the introduction of compost bins.  While dining hall workers are responsible for dining hall bins, student dorm representatives must empty and clean the smaller bins in dorm kitchens.  Without student-driven efforts to both install and maintain the bins, these changes would not have been enacted. In the not too distant future, Wellesley will need to set a global standard of producing large amounts of foods locally. Taking advantage of the space we have in the dorms would lead to the installation of a nutrient-rich sponge, as thin as wallpaper, in the common spaces. There, fruits and veggies can grow with little water, little room, and positive effects that include cleaner air, lower costs, and fresher food.

Past evidence of Foodways

The WCHAP excavation produced a number of food related finds. From sherds of Willow-Ware to an sardine key and recently abandoned beer caps, but the oyster epitomizes New England food culture. Considered a working class food staple until overfishing in the early 1900s rendered it a delicacy, the oyster has been central to Northeastern culinary heritage for centuries. For students arriving at Wellesley from across the country or overseas, the oyster could serve as a means of acculturation. For students from the area, the oyster, as local cuisine that was likely encountered in everyday life, reinforced Wellesley’s position as a second-home. Wellesley’s stringent regulations on dining forcibly promoted community building. Shared meals often encourage a level of intimacy between friends and family. The nuclear family instills the value of mealtime as an opportunity to share personal anecdotes and reinforce relationships. Institutionally-mandated mealtimes encouraged students to think of their peers as an extension of family, cementing the notion of Wellesley siblinghood. The extended family persona of Wellesley continues today, and though the rigid rules of dining have certainly relaxed, Wellesley students often eat meals together as a means for friendship building and a distraction from Wellesley’s rigor.

Present-day evidence of Foodways

Dorm eco-reps maintain these bins, which resulted from a student-driven effort to expand upon the dining hall composting program.  To avoid potential problems caused by smells, the bin lid can be completely sealed and also features a replaceable filter.  Along with its small size (about 2.4 gallons), these characteristics make the bins ideal for collection of coffee grounds, tea bags, and food scraps left from cooking in communal kitchens. Bin contents are combined with dining hall compost and processed together. Due to widespread popularity of the bins and increasing social awareness of food waste, the Office of Sustainability ordered additional bins in 2018, resulting in a total of 30 across campus.  Such an effort would not have been possible without a push from House Councils within dorms and widespread community efforts.

Future evidence of Foodways

This wallpaper is actually a nutrient-rich sponge that not only holds all the nutrients necessary to plant growth but holds water for an extended period of time. The design is such that it can be applied to walls with simple wall glue and the plants can grow sideways. The root systems spread thin and all the preplanted seeds are of plants which have been genetically crossed with resurrection plants to ensure they can be revived in case drought occurs. Students simply harvest the food when ready and then press new seeds into the paper. It can be used up to three times if crops are rotated. This wallpaper can be found inside the dorm of every Wellesley campus dorm, leading to high air quality for the students, as well as a smaller environmental footprint for the college as well as reduced cost of food shipment.