Freshmen Orientation at Babson College yesterday, my new academic home, signaled the start of new academic year. It’s also a special year for our family because my daughter Chase Asabe Opie is entering kindergarten and she’s very excited! I’m going to do some post on foodways and schools to celebrate the start of new academic year for students, teachers, and parents. Before he moved to Atlanta and became one of MLK’s deputies in the civil rights movement, Ralph David Abernathy led a student strike to protest food inequalities between faculty and students in the cafeteria of Alabama State College (Now Alabama State University (ASU) ). Abernathy enrolled in Alabama State in the late 1940s on the GI Bill after receiving an honorable discharge from the Army. Reflecting on the cafeteria food at AlabamaState, he remembers the students eating “heaps of steaming pork and beans—and nothing more, not even a piece of bread to sop it up,” for lunch. Dinner was not much different. He writes that the best dinner they ever had was Spam with unbuttered grits, while the faculty feasted on huge pieces of real country ham. “After several weeks of this fare, we were sick to death of it and were dreaming every night of fried chicken and biscuits.” Abernathy was elected student body president in his sophomore year. Right away he organized a complete student boycott of the cafeteria and it did not take long for the school’s administration to act: the next time the cafeteria opened at Alabama State, students “saw huge platters of fried chicken waiting at the counter.” Here a link to an ASU omenu so you can see how the food there has changed since the 1940s http://www.alasu.edu/current-students/dining/online-menus/index.aspx. Here’s a fried chicken recipe for college student living off campus without a meal card for the first time, that was my deal back in 1981.
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar