I was terrified of the caf in my first weeks at EMU. A non-mennonite, I didn’t have connections to anyone at the school. I sat alone for breakfasts, which was fine by me, but when lunch and dinner rolled around and I wasn’t sure an acquaintance was going to be there, it took a lot of nerve to walk through those doors alone.
That anxiety persisted for a long time. Even into my sophomore year I worried about where I would fit in at the tables of not-quite-familiar faces. But once I found my circle of friends, people I could gripe about classes and share meal-optimizing tips with, it got easier. Instead of a source of anxiety I came to see the caf as a wellspring of community.
I lived in Northlawn my first year, which I grew to love on cold winter mornings when my friends would arrive for breakfast in jackets and boots, I in my polar bear pajama shorts having shortly before rolled out of bed and walked down the stairs.
At lunch I experimented with the deli station, making honey-sriracha-mayo and ham sandwiches in the panini press. During dinner I stared longingly at the saute station, where I had once failed to make fried rice and avoided thereafter (except to make over easy eggs on the odd Saturday that I was awake in time to get breakfast).
The following Fall I could enter the caf largely undeterred by the crowds and find smiling familiar faces within the mass of overcrowded tables. It was homey by then.
That Spring was my cross-cultural in India. I was well acquainted with most of my group, and eventually formed persisting friendships with the juniors and seniors I hadn’t yet met. In Goa we took advantage of the lower costs at resort restaurants and sought fresh fruits from the market around the corner from our rooms.
Further south in Kerala we ate mostly vegetarian meals with our hands from off of banana leaves, and in a cooking class I learned a myriad of local dishes such as donut-like banana flavored treats, spicy mango teas and an enormous, multi-layered biryani dish for our final class.
When we craved tastes of home we’d venture to the market, trekking through the heat in hopes that there was still peanut butter and nutella in stock; that the other members of our group hadn’t bought them all up first. In my group house we would pass around a tub of ice cream on occasion, bought by a member of our “family,” which we savored in the heat without air-conditioning and often without power. We shared most every fruit and sweet snack we bought, but each of us had our own secret stash of nutella or oreos with our luggage.
By the end of cross-cultural I had a lengthy list of the meals I had been craving for months in my homesickness, and the first McDonald’s burger I ate that week was as magical and mediocre as I remembered.
Junior year was a whole new food experience. I lived in one of EMU’s group living houses on Mount Clinton Pike, where I could walk to SFI for fresh veggies or use my 60 block meal plan on days I couldn’t be bothered to head home for lunch. I learned that meal prepping is just as easy to start as it is to fall out of the habit of, and ate more Aldi brand Chef Boyardee than I am proud to admit. My roommates and I made cookies and pies when the stress of midterms and finals made us restless, which we ate while playing video games on snow days instead of studying.
That Spring I left Harrisonburg for a second cross-cultural, this time to join the Washington Community Scholars Program in DC, where I got a new experience with group living. I served as the house’s kitchen manager, planning meals and shopping lists for each week. I called my mom on many evenings to ask if it was normal for a sauce to be bubbling like this, or for a casserole to cave in like that, and so on. As oranges had been my favorite snack in India, I ventured to Chinatown on my way home from my internship at least once a week for hot, fresh pork buns from Joy Luck House.
Returning my senior year and living off campus, I made most of my meals at the apartment I shared with friends, only coming to the caf on commuter Fridays and for Weather Vane lunch meetings. I ate more Mr. J’s breakfast sandwiches than I can count while working at Common Grounds, and drank enough coffee to last a lifetime (I’ve since switched over to tea for the sake of my jittery body and for as long as I can manage to resist the call of cappuccinos).
With my limited budget I taught myself to love sauteed bell peppers as long as they’re heavily seasoned atop a cream cheese everything bagel (sprinkled generously with dill), I made bread from scratch for the first time and a whole host of other recipes I’d never have thought to try without the years of experiences EMU gave me.
From trying the cuisine of some of the best restaurants Harrisonburg has to offer while writing reviews for Weather Vane, almost coming close to making microfoam fit for latte art (not that I ever approached the perfection a certain co-editor in chief achieved behind Common Ground’s counter), and getting to experience meals from cultures across the globe or in the nation’s capital, my love for food grew along with the community I came to find in Harrisonburg and afar, and it’s been one wild and delicious journey.
