Food

On Wednesdays, I have two free lunches, one after another. The first is associated with Penn Language and Communication IGERT program. The second is called Splunch, for speech and phonetics lunch, hosted by the phonetics lab.

At football games, Penn undergrads throw slices of toast onto the field. It's a tradition that started after alcohol was banned in the football field. During the fight song (or the school song, or some song like that), there's a line that goes "Here's a toast, to dear old Ben[jamin Franklin]".  The engineering department has actually designed a toast zamboni to clean up all the toast from the field.

What ties these two thoughts together is that there is a group of students who want to end the Toast Toss.  I read some of their flyers today, which included some statistics on poverty and hunger in Philadelphia. The line that caught my eye said "What does the Toast Toss mean about Penn?" I'm struck by the fact that I had never reflected on how frivolously throwing bread around, or receiving two free lunches in one day might seem to a chronically poor and hungry person living in my own city.