Dormitories are not conducive to cooking, nor do colleges consider a love for food, a worthy pastime. We are presumably in college because we are better than the kitchen, because we are smart enough to want to do more than learn about that simplistic and unintellectual domestic realm where some chemistry and some intuitive knowledge of how long it takes onions to brown will only get you to a good soup.

College women I have spoken with are almost proud of the fact they don’t know how to cook-they are not their mothers, nor their mothers’ mothers, who were shackled by their apron strings to a life of tutelage under Betty Crocker. The paid service workers take care of what we’ve so carelessly eradicated from our consciousness, and that once art has been transformed into an impersonal sandwich defrosted or hastily made, consumed with no more attention than that it was created with. After all, we have other things to think about.

I can’t help but feel that we are losing something in giving up regular pleasures of the table; to me, food is communion. I remember over the summer sautéing these incredible sea scallops, all pink-white turned cream-colored in the pan, while the butter foamed and wafted into every corner of the house. It was the most exquisite seafood I’d ever tasted. My parents, my boyfriend and I ate them alongside a simple salad of big taxi-yellow heirloom tomatoes.

I remember, earlier in my life, coming to a trattoria just outside the Uffizi gallery in Florence on some plain side street, when the afternoon was waning and most of the diners were gone. I was so hungry I could feel my stomach jumping inside of me. I ordered simply: bruschetta, made with some of the best tomatoes and finely-pressed olive oil, and a glass of wine, vino rosso, and ate, feeling in every bite the great virtue of well-made cuisine.

There are other dining experiences that hold onto me: watching the sushi chef spend 10 minutes perfecting a roll, molding the rice and cutting the fish with a surgeon’s precision; waking up early to attempt a spinach-frittata recipe torn crudely from the pages of Gourmet and eating it, wide-eyed in gastronomic amazement, on the floor of my apartment; spreading goat cheese on apple slices under the banner of hills in Oregon country, on the first real warm afternoon of my stay; folding stewed lentils in injera flatbread with my fingers at a small Ethiopian joint on South Grand.

I understand why students shun the chef’s knife for the pen. We are busy, our kitchen access limited and our society is not one that values the quality and art of food anymore. I understand it, but I think it’s sad. It feels like a loss of culture. I look at the strong food traditions of the world, at the Indians stewing garbanzos and curry, at the French braising lamb in wine and brushing pie crusts with real butter; I watch Lidia Bastianich shred Parmigiano Reggiano onto hand-made pasta and crush basil with pine nuts and olive oil to make pesto. And then I look at our own unwise kitchens, abandoned for our biology homework, forgotten a long time ago because other people began to do the work for us, to save us time. We lost something in the agreement.

It might seem a strange thing to lament, when there are things like wars and poverty and math requirements looming over us, but never the less, I do. I believe in what the famous food writer Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher once wrote:

“We must eat. If, in the face of that dread fact, we can find other nourishment, and tolerance and compassion for it, we’ll be no less full of human dignity.”

Roberta Singer is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences.