Many college cafeterias today follow McDonaldization. For this exercise, I set out to disrupt a McDonaldized cafeteria at Michigan State University. The chosen cafeteria was South Pointe, located in State’s Case Hall. South Pointe is McDonaldized because it follows the four dimensions of McDonaldization described in George Ritzer’s The McDonaldization of Society: efficiency, calculability, predictability and control. The cafeteria is efficient because it has buffet style food that allows servers to quickly get food to each customer. South Pointe has calculability because it offers a large amount of food. The cafeteria is predictable because it has stations that offer the same food every day. Finally, South Pointe has control because each station offers few options. The college’s McDonaldized cafeterias are “both ‘enabling’ and ‘constraining’” (16). The cafeteria’s “enabling” aspects are appealing in that they offer college students, most of whom have limited access to cooking utensils and ingredients, the chance to easily incorporate meals into their busy routines. The cafeteria’s “constraining” aspects are unappealing in that they discourage the students from ever learning to cook for themselves. In Laura Shapiro’s, Something from the Oven, she revealed that many young adults today “(lack) the taste memory and the skills their mothers or grandmothers had brought to the kitchen” (80). The many McDonaldized food systems “make it impossible to go back to a world… of home-cooked meals” (16) since this generation largely has largely missed out on learning how to cook. To disrupt this McDonaldized system, I interfered with the cafeteria’s efficiency and predictability. I caused the disruption at a station in the cafeteria that offers various sandwiches. At the station, I asked the server for a burger with grilled and fried chicken on top. The server seemed taken aback by my order and asked what I wanted once more. After I repeated my order, the server had confused look on her face as she struggled to successfully stack the different meats onto a bun. My odd order disrupted South Pointe’s predictability because I forced the server to behave in an abnormal way by ordering an off the menu meal. As the server handed me my plate, I asked her how her day was going then went on to tell her about my own. During my story, I could feel the people in line behind me becoming impatient with my inappropriately timed conversation. As my story went on, the server politely pretended to keep listening while she handed food to people in line behind me. Once I finished my story, I wished her nice day and left. This disrupted the cafeteria’s efficiency because I slowed down the rate that people got their food in addition to distracting the server from her job.
Despite no one confronting me directly, there were obvious negative reactions to my disruption of the cafeteria. At one point, I glanced to the side during my story and saw the people in line behind me had annoyed looks on their faces. Also, while the server attempted to be polite by not shooing me away, her face clearly reflected her disinterest and contempt that I was bothering her during work. The overall experience made me uncomfortable and extremely self-aware. The animosity that the people in line behind me were suppressing made me feel as though I had done something terribly wrong. The fact that something as minor as an odd order and extended conversation elicited so many negative responses showed the patrons of South Pointe are used to and expect their McDonaldized cafeteria.