It’s kind of impossible to eat well on UT campus.

Instead of starting with an ironic build-up on increasingly regrettable food options, let’s start with the fact that at the nexus of campus, the easiest place to get to from everywhere else, there is a Starbucks. They used to just sell sugary coffee and sugar breads, but apparently the fact that the Hodges Starbucks is the first or second top-grossing store in the country means corporate wants to compile some business data on how well selling us small, unfulfilling and overpriced breakfast sandwiches goes. Variety is great, but I wouldn’t be complaining unless the sandwich felt like a great addition instead of a how-else-can-we-screw-desperate-people-trapped-in-a-library. I (and hopefully the fine people making your coffee) also know better than to expect rewards or special treatment for giving them such amazing business for so long.

At Haslam and Art & Architecture, we’ve got an Einsteins, where you can eat bread or a processed wrap. If you’re not feeling cold bread, the UC is pretty close, where you can spend your parent’s money on processed Asian, Sbarro’s (which I adore), chips with processed chili and fake cheese or more bread at Subway. Walk down the hall and the cafeteria food doesn’t look much different, the gourmet Mexican being the highest quality and distinctively most expensive. For variety and wholeness of food, one’s best bet is the Presidential Cafeteria meal plan, but that can be socially taxing to eat at if you’re not 19 years old and/or a freshman, a problem compounded by the music industry’s propaganda TVs blaring garbage. It’s all rather alienating.

I sound condescending. But I’ve been quite literally living off of these places for two years now, and I’ve never not felt we’re being completely taken advantage of. I love the molten lava Sante Fe wrap at Einsteins, and just smile at the $5+ tag. I love my Venti Starbucks Doubleshot with white mocha. I just stand and smile whenever they marginally raise their prices over a break to take advantage of artificial demand. To somehow not go with the flow of convenient and mostly yummy, yet universally unhealthy and expensive, would feel wrong.

T hought exercise: Your only alternative to eat on a busy day is by planning out and making breakfast, lunch and dinner to take with you in your backpack, so you do it. That makes me feel a twinge of irrational guilt, because I’d be obviously opting out of the larger commercial culture around me. My subconscious consumer values would feel uneasy about breaking out something homemade in a Saran-wrapped bowl from my kitchen when everyone else is eating Aramark. We want, no, have a biological need to give the prevailing culture we’ve spent our entire lives in the blind benefit of the doubt. Even though the multinational food service corporations that have the singular privilege of operating directly on campus have no loyalty but to themselves, their absurd ubiquity subtly defines us.

But our short-term energy and long-term health (as well as savings) mandates breaking away. Government and business agree on just about everything — only magnifying their subtle differences for our theatrical amusement — but they are in absolute concurrence when it comes to what people should eat. The answer? Bread, more bread, grains, sugar, mostly fake cheese, milk and salty, cheap flesh-like substances from bits of sad creatures with starchy filler. “Good” meat is salty, fatty pig meat meant to exude something Italian. No wonder there’s a big vegetarian and vegan movement. But they’re not nutritionally ahead of anyone — they still fill up on grains like cattle shut back in the feed lot after a PR photo-shoot on the pasture. Cows eat grass, not grain, which unlike fruits and vegetables have never relied on seed transportation via ingestion by bird and beast. Why do you think grain cereals have to be fortified to oblivion with nutrients? Because they themselves have almost none. Think grains are synonymous with fiber? They can’t hold a candle to how saturated unstarchy vegetables and fruits are with fiber.

Think the profit motive is infallible? Think an unregulated profit motive should be allowed to dictate what we eat? The profit motive synthesizes indigestible food our bodies (which happen to be ourselves) don’t know what to do with, calls it 100 percent beef and theatrical conservatives would cry class warfare and socialism. But government is and will always be content with subsidizing grain and starchy corn, passing it (and incredible government savings for the private sector) off as the staple of a healthy diet.

Class warfare has been declared, in the form of discriminating scientific nutrition knowledge vs. the stubbornly maintained cultural myths. Earthfare’s business model is, unfortunately, not just empty marketing, although it pulls many fast ones. UT is no more nutritionally worse off then any modern college campus I’ve been to. But when it comes to eating well, we have nobody to turn to but ourselves — society will not help us.

— Wiley Robinson is a junior in ecology and evolutionary studies. He can be reached at rrobin23@utk.edu.