Sarah Madsen

I vividly recall childhood nights when my mom would gently wake me and my sisters, bundling us up in jackets and thick blankets as we filed into the family van. Together we would journey to the piston plant where my dad worked a third shift, but not before making the same stop – a McDonalds stationed on the main highway into our small Wisconsin town. Neon lights bright against the night sky, my mom would order dinner for my dad, the same meal each time: a double quarter pounder with cheese, ketchup only.

 

These nighttime rituals were sometimes the only moments I would spend with my dad, scattered between jobs at a cabinetry shop and the local hospital and the piston plant. Later, he would teach me how to open cans – mushy but palatable green beans, Dinty Moore beef stew, corned beef hash to be served with eggs and toast – all of which I would heat up on the stove for me and my younger sister, after school suppers for when he worked late.

 

Across my childhood, food functioned as a site of familial connection, of burgeoning responsibility, and of classed realities. Food took on new meaning and form during my undergraduate years, as I moved across the country to Pepperdine University.

 

Once settled in Southern California, I was exposed to new cuisines – and new tastes. The high-income habitus of my affluent peers was especially clear in the comparisons of our dining choices: as they regularly ventured to fine dining establishments that also catered to celebrities, I waited patiently for two-dollar taco Tuesdays, or found myself relegated to the campus cafeteria, my meal plan included in a full-ride scholarship.

 

I later became an RA at Pepperdine, in part because I loved the programmatic and formational opportunities of the role, and in part because it ensured my housing and food would continue to be covered. I still stocked a few packets of ramen in my dorm room closet, a practice reminiscent of childhood that served me well over school breaks and caf closures.

 

Arriving at Baylor University in the fall of 2015, I was much in the same position as my time in undergrad: tuition covered, but without a car and even less certain of where my meals might come from. Hitching rides to our local grocery store became a grad school pastime of mine, and the luxury of a full kitchen gave me space to hone my cooking and baking skills. Around this time, I joined my co-authors’ efforts to address food insecurity at Baylor, volunteering at mobile food pantries and later serving as the inaugural graduate apprentice of our campus food pantry. This work – at once scholarly and practical – carried across my doctoral and postdoctoral journeys, as I completed a dissertation project on consumers and consumerism in higher education.

 

Starving the Dream is an accomplishment of good practice and good theorizing. But more than that, it’s an ode to the long importance of food in our lives and in our families, and to the ways food so expansively captures stratification and belonging and opportunity and mobility in higher education.