Looking at HUDS pasta makes me tired. The flaccid noodles sit there mostly stuck together in those weirdly shaped silver pots next to other pots filled with red paste that the trendy, curved HUDS placard assures me is marinara sauce. I can’t help but feel a deep existential exhaustion.
And so it was with a joyful heart that upon returning to school this year I discovered that lunchtime pasta had been replaced by a chili bar. The silver pots remained, but now with happily burbling vegetarian and meat chili alongside a bevy of cornbread laid out on an understated crimson tablecloth. I’ll admit it, I was unsure at first. My southern upbringing has inculcated me with a healthy sense of skepticism when it comes to Yankees trying to make Southern food. I need not have feared. It fulfilled the highest praise I can give to HUDS food: spectacularly solid. It’s the oatmeal of lunch.
I've been assured by one of my professors this term that all you need to be convincing is to have three pieces of evidence. With that in mind, I make my case for chili.
Chili as ‘Aesthetic Experience’
Also like oatmeal, chili is far more than food. It’s a blank can vas on which to create. This Friday, a person I had not talked to since Opening Days plopped her tray down next to mine and started extolling the value of the chili bar. What she had on her tray was a thing of beauty. A healthy serving of five-bean Chili garnished with a devil-may-care dollop of sour cream, which in turn was caressed lovingly by a sprinkling of shredded cheese. The whole ensemble was topped off with judiciously chopped chives.
Yogurtland may be closed, but thanks to the chili bar, self-serve aesthetic curation is alive and well in Cambridge.
Chili is the missing link
Chili fulfills a food niche that HUDS has often missed, consistency-wise. HUDS food is, by and large, segregated into solids and liquids. That saddens me. Before chili, chowder was the closest to the lumpy, chunky center that HUDS food went. Chili adds a crucial missing link in the HUDS food-consistency spectrum.
Chili is inclusive.
Pasta is the linchpin of glutenbased food supremacy. With varieties both meat and five-bean, Chili satisfies all the major dietary trends: vegetarian, paleo, gluten-free, Atkins, South Beach, Eastern Bloc, Northern Lite. (The last two are not diets but I’m confident chili would fit in.) As evidenced by my reconnection with my Opening Days companion, chili brings people together, evoking memories of generations of cowboys whipping up chili around a campfire or suburban dads having a gregarious chili cookoff. And ultimately, that’s the value of chili. In a campus plagued by discussions of social exclusivity, chili is an accessible-to-all antidote. So, next time you’re at lunch, ladle yourself a heaping bowlful of chili, grab yourself a slab of cornbread, and set about making friends one spoonful at a time.
