Comment

Joanna Newsom's Astounding Masterpiece: "Sapokanikan"

150
Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus1/08/2022 3:47:22 am PST

re: #148 Decatur Deb

When I was in college I lived in a very large dorm.

There was of course a dining hall. The cafeteria made enough food to feed a thousand.

Being cafeteria food it was often, at best, edible.

Still, when making say 100 bain-marie of lasagna the amount of effort needed is not the same as making 1000 servings of lasagna in one’s own kitchen. A professional kitchen can turn out that volume.

So, this gets me back to the sad food court at the local mall.

I get that a campus full of retail outlets will want, need, to feed the employees daily.

Personally I think said mall should dump the food court and just open a cafeteria where the store workers can get subsidized meals. Regular shoppers could eat there too at sticker price.

Now you might think that a mall food court really is a cafeteria, but the vendors suffer because they can’t use the economy of scale. Each little vendor has their own kitchen, their own bored front workers, etc.

Back in the day, this is really back, the big department stores had cafeterias. I lived in a town that was not really big, but I do remember that the department stores had something similar.

When Kresge turned into K-mart and built their huge single-story stores, K-mart decided to keep that tradition and put in a cafeteria. Food was bad (if my memory is serving me rightly.) It was a downscaled version of the original idea (of large department stores having cafeterias.)