Field Trip to the Kosher Kitchen: Religion and Politics in the University Dining Hall

One Tuesday afternoon during our regularly scheduled class period, my students and I took a class trip to a space that was intimately familiar to them: the dining hall located amidst the freshmen and sophomore dorms. We gathered just outside the serving area, near the tables where a few students lingered over a late lunch or an early afternoon snack. The à-lacarte serving area is clean, shiny, and attractive. Built only four years ago, it offers a diverse selection of options at different stations—including, most importantly for our class, a kosher station. As the class gathered, my students greeted friends who walked by, laughing self-consciously, “I’m here for a class!” Once my fourteen students had arrived, we followed Karen Zeffren, a kosher kitchen supervisor, through the serving area and into a space my students knew less about—the kitchens and storerooms where the food was prepared. We walked past busy food service workers. “Here are the new dishwashers!” joked one chef. We followed Karen through the kitchens, up an elevator, and into the much smaller space of the university’s kosher kitchens. At Washington University in St. Louis, I taught an upper level, interdisciplinary course on the politics of religion and food among Jews in the United States. Beginning with the colonial period, we examined the cultural, social, historical, political, and economic practices relating to the production and consumption of food that have sustained and demarcated American Jewish communities. The course is weighted toward twentiethcentury and contemporary concerns, bringing questions about organized religious institutions, individual choices, and structures of power closer to students’ lives. Thus, while I generally encouraged students to bracket their own opinions and religious perspectives in order to minimize preconceptions about our subject matter, students’ backgrounds and experiences were often relevant to our conversations. Washington University is a private research institution in suburban St. Louis, with a national and international student population. According to Hillel International, a Jewish campus organization, 25 percent of the undergraduate population of Washington University is Jewish, and many Jewish students come from the northeast US, particularly the New York metropolitan area. Of the fourteen students in my class, nearly all had some Jewish background; only one positioned herself as a non-Jew in classroom discussions. The students were a mix of classes and majors, from first-year students in the business school to seniors majoring in Jewish, Near Eastern, and Islamic Studies. All of them could be urged into enthu-