Looking back at dining on campus through the years
For nearly four centuries, Harvard University has educated young people — and fed them. When the University responded to the COVID-19 pandemic in March by curtailing on-campus operations and sending students home, it maintained the teaching but not the feeding. Both functions will be restored someday. But maybe not exactly as before. Food’s significance for social inclusion and equality is the main theme of “Resetting the Table,” an exhibit at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography for which I was guest curator. Now that no one can gather around the exhibit’s central table — or any table at Harvard — I’ve been thinking about what past crises show about food and Harvard. Two earlier emergencies had different outcomes: the College’s use of food to enforce social hierarchy survived the American Revolution, but not World War II. It’ll be the second era’s more forthright reforms that we’ll need, moving forward. Once...