Mass Production. Masser Consumption

Was the Jester cafeteria food of the ’80s hard to swallow? For me, it was paradise.

It’s well and good to take stock of the diners and dives where we ate out as students, but we haven’t really sized up college cuisine until we’ve accounted for the fare we ate day in and day out — our daily bread.

For this freshman of 1985, between the occasional trips to Mad Dog & Beans, G.M. Steakhouse, or Aleta’s Fajitas, there stretched out before me the daily fare of Jester Center. North America’s largest dormitory when built in 1969, the brown-brick metropolis still sleeps 3,200 souls and takes up an entire city block, much of it 14 floors high.

Then as now, such an operation required industrial-scale food preparation and service to feed its own Orwellian masses. I was on both sides of this equation: I ate there for the three semesters I lived in Jester, but I worked in the cafeteria almost my entire four years of school.

If you’re expecting the old saw here about how inedible cafeteria food is, sorry to disappoint. To the contrary, for an 18-year-old boy, the three-times-a-day low-brow buffet was a fantasy come true. The first time I entered the department-store-like, dual-level matrix of staggered serving lines, I slowly circled them before picking a victim. Would it be pizza, hamburgers, fried fish, casserole, mixed veggies, salad bar (I acknowledged only its peanut butter and jelly), the ice cream line, the drink station, or all of the above? I’m pretty sure I heard a choir of angels.

We never felt especially limited by what sorts of food ought to go with what others. If you wanted to wash down that burger with a couple of slices of pizza, just be sure to get a clean plate. Nothing complements a pork chop like side of fried chicken.

And may I say there was no meal that couldn’t be enhanced by a glass of chocolate milk or three.

The close proximity of multiple buffets inspired creativity as well. Having always been a Reese’s devotee, I had my own dessert routine that involved getting a bowl of chocolate ice cream, then buzzing the salad bar for a generous dollop of peanut butter on top.

Had we written them down, every dinner menu would have read like a death-row last meal request. And had I harbored any guilt over this gluttony, it would have been quickly relieved by the sight of hulking student-athletes balancing heaped trays that made my estimable portions look like deprivation.

Today, the ground floor of Jester (J1 to the hip) is unrecognizable — converted into a sort of food court called Jester City Limits and flanked by a bakery, a smoothie shop, a convenience store, and an organic food store. There are towns that have less variety.

For its part, J2, that second level, had gone entirely unchanged since the day I walked out more than two decades earlier. But nothing is forever, and this very month, it too is getting a facelift. But that non-rational, purely nostalgic part of me hopes that the menu will survive, and that in some configuration, skinny underclassmen will still circumambulate those staggered cafeteria lines — pizza, burgers and fries, ice cream, chocolate milk. Skinny for now, of course. Eat up, boys.

Avrel Seale, BS '89, Life Member, was editor of The Alcalde from 1997-2009 and now serves as speechwriter to UT President Bill Powers.