The Hungry Poet: My Life in Food — In the Canteen Queue with Le Corbusier

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If the house is ‘a machine for living in’, as Le Corbusier claimed, then the canteen must be a machine for eating in. Although, for some reason, I struggle to imagine Le Corbusier waiting in line for ‘sausage and mash Monday’, or ‘fish and chips Friday’, let alone navigating the intricacies of the salad bar. However, I’m sure he would have approved of how the canteen prizes function over ornamentation, and he would surely have appreciated all the stainless steel on show. In many ways, they are little cathedrals of stainless steel: cutlery, jugs, serving spoons, ladles, counters, worktops, baking trays, pots, pans, steamers, colanders, trolleys, bowls, whisks, all clashing, bashing, crashing, banging and clattering about, glinting under stainless steel heat lamps. The lack of raw concrete might have put him off, though.

We may be quick to lambast institutional food as beige, tasteless, predictable, lacking finesse, and reminiscent of some awful gruel-like or gristly school dinner (and some of it may well be), but I’ve had some great eating experiences in canteens. In fact, I’d go as far as to say the hit-and-miss, what’ll-it-be-today nature of the refectory is part of its appeal. Not all food can be made to order. Canteen food, in fact, when well thought out can be excellent, benefiting from being cooked in huge batches for longer, and imparting more flavour, for example. Lasagne anyone? A good Shepherd’s pie? Chicken pie? Spaghetti bolognese? Chilli? And how else are we supposed to feed a mass of people quickly and cheaply, anyhow?

It’s said the idea of the cafeteria came about in the late 19th century, and was primarily self-service. It then developed over time, with Childs Restaurant chain in the USA introducing the ‘tray line’, you know, the bars we shuffle our trays along, asking ‘please sir, can I have some more?’ Wasn’t it Shakespeare who wrote something about shuffling off this mortal tray line?

For some the very idea of a canteen may conjure up Oliver’s bowl of gruel in the workhouse. But on the whole I’ve found there to be something oddly humane, comforting and inviting about these places: the hot spotlights on the food, the steam from the bain-maries keeping the soggy veg warm and, well, soggy – just the way I like them –, the skin on the custard jug, the stack of warmed plates, the extra ladle of gravy from the kitchen staff, and the theatricality of someone dropping and smashing their plate. 

Like many, I now work from home, and I miss the communal aspect of a canteen lunch. Shovelling two boiled eggs and buttered toast into my gob at the island, while standing up, just isn’t quite the same. 

As an English teacher for 13 years, the canteen was a part of my daily life, indeed, it was usually the highlight of the day, walking to lunch with colleagues, chatting and eating together. Two of the three schools I worked at were private schools, which meant as a teacher you got a hot lunch every day. But, as we know, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Looking back, I’m pretty sure those schools more than recouped the money they spent feeding us in the hours we gave to planning, marking, and all manner of extra-curricular guff – although I did my best to fill my plate. If anything, the free food was just helping me do more work; if there was anything they didn’t want, it was a drop off in productivity, after all, or staff dropping like flies for that matter. I mean, how could they explain that to the next crop of prospective parents? Indeed, we may be forgiven for thinking the canteen is capitalism’s way of dealing, efficiently as possible, with that annoying, recurring impediment to relentless progress: human hunger. In short, let’s face it, the institutions we work for eat us up and spit us out, so we may as well enjoy our lunch in the process.

I realise my take on canteens may not be the same as everyone’s. George Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four presents us with one of the most miserable canteens in the whole of literature. The beginning of Chapter 5 is worth quoting in full:

In the low-ceilinged canteen, deep underground, the lunch queue jerked slowly forward. The room was already very full and deafeningly noisy. From the grille at the counter the steam of stew came pouring forth, with a sour metallic smell which did not quite overcome the fumes of Victory Gin. On the far side of the room there was a small bar, a mere hole in the wall, where gin could be bought at ten cents the large nip.

While I can’t remember any of the canteens I’ve visited serving gin, I can remember a few that would have benefited from it.

When I left my full-time teaching role in December 2023, to finish my PhD, do the childcare while my wife returned to work, and start out as self-employed, one of the questions I kept getting asked was: will you miss teaching? It was a perfectly reasonable question, but one I was never easily able to answer. If I said no, for example, that wouldn’t have been entirely true – entirely being the operative word. In truth, I had mixed feelings about leaving the teaching profession. I certainly wouldn’t miss the marking, the meetings, the feeling of Groundhog Day, or the hierarchical nature of the place. Then there was having to give up Saturdays to take sports teams and all that. It’s really quite dull when I list it here and put it into words, and also seems quite trivial. I suppose the thing with any institution, but particularly an educational one, is that it gives you as much as it takes from you, and in most cases does more of the latter than the former. 

After some thinking I can narrow the things I will miss, or the things I most vividly remember about teaching down to four, and they are sounds, funnily enough:

1.     Music Rehearsals

The first is the sound of students playing music in the rehearsal rooms – there was something so hopeful and gleeful about hearing a burst of a song from one the 3rd year bands, or someone noodling away on their saxophone, even if it was all out of tune and time.

2.     After Games

The second that will stay with me is the sound of the cricket field in the summer term, after the match is over and the students have gone home, and I’m the last one there, taking the bails off the stumps and packing up the kit bags and returning them to the shed. Schools are the most transient of places and the strangest, eeriest of places in their constant filling and emptying of people. In many ways they are very restless places, despite the fact some of them are ancient institutions: rooms, corridors, halls, car parks, laboratories, playing fields, full then empty, empty then full, like the chambers of the egg timer, decanting itself into itself, until the day is over, and a teacher is left on the outfield tidying up, pocketing the bails. 

3.     Imagination

The third is the sound of students reading and writing. When I taught at a school in Bradford, I used to get sworn at, spat on, ignored – on a good day – and ridiculed by pupils, but when I took classes to the library, I could hardly believe how they transformed. They would sit and read in total silence, and for that one hour a week there would be peace in the room, but more importantly they seemed to tap into a sense of peace in themselves, which seemed more than significant given the complicated and fractured family lives most of them would return to at the end of the school day. 

It was the library, not my classroom, that was the refuge for those students, and stepping out of the classroom with its rows of desks and chairs, and formalities and rules and discipline – or at least my frankly laughable attempts at imposing these things – they seemed to relax and, in relaxing, behave. They could sit on the more comfortable, cushioned chairs however they pleased, they could read a book they had chosen. That one hour a week was the only time I ever felt like I succeeded at that school, and the irony was it didn’t involve any of my lesson planning or teaching or input, in fact the whole success of it was rooted in the opposite: the fact that I was not involved. I took them to the library and I opened the door for them, and I took the register, and said ‘now you may get out your books and read.’ And that was it. But, as I came to learn, that was all I needed to do. 

4.     The Canteen

The last sound, though, – to return to the culinary thrust of this piece – was the din of the dining hall: that will stay with me. Seeing students eating communally at long tables, and chatting without phones, and eating their spaghetti and meatballs or cake and custard, or tearing their lumps of bread, laughing, conspiring, or merely idling, was always something that made me happy to see, in a way I can’t fully explain. And of course, the whooping and hollering that ensued if a tray was dropped or a plate was smashed. What didn’t amuse me, though, was the amount of food some would leave untouched on their plate – but that’s another article. As teachers, even though we were on a different table, there was a rare sense of equality between us and the students as we all gathered to eat, especially as we’d be eating the same food as them – there was no special treatment for the teachers, indeed especially not for the teachers, as we weren’t paying the fees, after all. Lunchtime was a great leveller. Students would see you eating the same food they were eating and vice versa, you could even analyse the lunch offering in period 6 with Year 10. But this is what will stay with me, the shared experience of eating together, which was so much more important, and where just as much could be learned, by talking to each other, as in any classroom. 

I should also add that I have a soft spot for school dining hall food, particularly cake and custard, which after teaching for four hours on the trot, could have offered no greater moment of uplift, even if the custard was, as I predicted, one of the no-added sugar varieties, and overly runny at times.

But I love the experience of canteens. First of all, there is the collecting of the tray; well, first of all you have to find where the trays are, and then when you have found them only to realise that they’ve all been taken you then have to look again. Once you’ve discovered the trays there’s the queue. There’s nothing like a good old-fashioned canteen queue, where you can catch a whiff of what’s being served and try to guess but never quite know in full until you’re at the front – it’s a masterclass in anticipation. Then comes the chat with the others in the queue, if you know them – that’s usually quite funny or awkward or funny in its awkwardness. Then comes the chat with the server, and the interaction there, and the wonderful action of someone putting food on your plate with a great plop, flop or slop. 

What I most love about the whole canteen experience is the communality and the unpretentiousness of it; indeed, it’s the exact opposite of pretentious, it can’t be, there’s just too much stainless steel and overcooked veg. And any food that is cooked with a view to serving a large number of people is usually crowd-pleasing food, food which is tried and tested and, in its DNA, satisfies our appetites and palettes. Therefore, there’s great safety and comfort in this type of eating. Sitting down and comparing or noticing what colleagues eat is also part of it as we learn about each other but in a trivial, fun, indirect way. For example, who just eats the salad, who’s overdone it with the custard, whose meat is swimming in gravy?

So, yes, these are things I’ll miss about teaching in a school. 

Despite being ill at ease with being institutionalised by working in a school, having lunch in the canteen was a moment of somehow escaping the sense of institutionalisation, it was a moment reconnecting with one’s own true self through appeasing the body’s call for sustenance, a moment of de-institutionalising oneself. As for institutional food, I don’t think food can be institutionalised; there is too much in food that is bound up with pleasure and the individual and humanity that it resists any of that nonsense, even if it is eaten in a machine.