For quite some time I’ve been intrigued by the cultural phenomenon of institutional food service and what it says about us socially. What I’m talking about here are meals for the masses that are usually served in a food line. For most of us, the school cafeteria is our main point of reference when it comes to institutional dining.

I’m going to venture out onto a strange limb here and argue that at any given point in our lives, how we relate to a cafeteria is probably a pretty accurate indicator of how we view our place in the universe. This isn’t as weird as it sounds.

In my youth we all had our school cafeteria horror stories about mystery meat surprise, but one thing every person who subsisted on lunch room grub knew for sure was that the assortment of mismatched foods sitting there in the steam trays constituted a nutritionally balanced meal. Everyone ate the same thing, which injected an element of democracy into the daily ritual of going down the line.

It was Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society on a lunch tray.

At the same time, the school cafeteria in my day was one of those places where sameness showed its dark side. In one of those odd twists that happen when adolescents start formulating their own values, I distinctly recall a stigma becoming attached to bringing lunch from home.

My sensible mother, who heard my complaints about the food at school, suggested that she prepare me a sack lunch and was shocked to learn that taking a homemade lunch to school would constitute some kind of social transgression. Nothing could be worse in junior high than being different from everyone else.

Other social aspects of the school cafeteria were confining as well. During our 30 minutes of enforced communion we quickly splintered into groups and we tended to stick with the same groups every day.

Even so, I recall being puzzled when I learned that high schools now have open lunch periods, as if this marked some major social change. Then I realized that students are still all eating the same thing, but they’re simply doing it at McDonald’s without an assistant principal watching over them.

I went a long time without giving institutional food service much thought until I started teaching at Baker University, where the administration tries to encourage collegiality and mingling with students by giving every faculty member 75 free lunches during the academic year. The mingling thing doesn’t happen much, but faculty members do sit together. A free lunch is a great social magnet and I bite on the offer at least once a week.

Some things about cafeteria food haven’t changed. If you go through the regular line, the menu often packs plenty of starchy carbs. The portions are so generous that if you want the side vegetable with the entree, the server has to put it in little bowl. This gives a whole new significance to the Freshman 15.

What’s different is that the big emphasis is on choices. In addition to the regular line, where two entrees and various side dishes and desserts are available, there’s a salad bar, of course, but also a potato bar and a sandwich bar. There’s also a self-serve ice cream freezer and a frozen custard machine. What this means is that people aren’t all eating the same thing.

I’ve noticed that some of my lunch partners even use the assemblage on their cafeteria trays to make personal statements. Rick Bayha, who touts his Pennsylvania Dutch roots, invariably prepares himself a bowl of cottage cheese with a glob of apple butter on top, which requires him to stop at the perpetual breakfast bar to complete his meal. And Inge Balch, who teaches art, routinely takes a dinner plate to the salad bar, where she employs the principles of color and composition in arranging the ingredients for her lunch.

It still may be an institutional cafeteria with steam trays, hair nets and cliques, but this time around the experience is just varied different enough to make it interesting.