Skip to Content, Navigation, or Footer.

Barth Wu ’26: A response to Benjamin Aizenberg ’26

Untitled Artwork

Dearest reader, over winter break I anticipated welcoming you back into the somewhat sticky embrace of the Sharpe Refectory and alleviating any apprehension you might have towards our largest dining hall. I was surprised, then, to discover that my work had already been done for me last week by Ben Aizenberg, who argued that the Ratty is actually too good.

Aizenberg makes two points. First, he writes that the excessive gourmet-ification of college dining risks inflating our sense of what we consider normal. He goes on to say that as undergraduate students, we miss out on the collegiate rite of passage associated with mediocre food and subpar living accommodations. (I’d argue that there are other college rites of passage, and bad food and drafty dorms seem the least important.)

While he leads with this point, Aizenberg is really using the attention-grabbing idea — that the Ratty is too good — to talk about a much larger trend in higher education: Academic institutions are becoming brands and businesses. He explains that colleges are increasingly offering resort-style living and charging obscene prices for amenities that either select for a wealthy student body or put students and their families into debt. 

It is certainly diabolical for universities to jack up the price of a bachelor’s degree, but I want to set the record straight on the history of dining at Brown. Aizenberg suggests that the marketing of gourmet dining experiences at the University is new, having appeared concurrently with the inflation of tuition and with the intention of attracting and appealing to genteel students. Really, this branding has been around far longer. 

ADVERTISEMENT

Consider two dinner menus. The first: baked ham with champagne sauce, cheese lasagna with meatless or meat sauce, Lyonnaise potatoes, Italian bread and ice cream sundaes. The second: crispy skin salmon, roasted fingerling potatoes with herbs, vegan Mapo tofu, coconut ginger rice, snow peas with ginger and scallions, raspberry crumble bar and vegan chocolate cake. 

I think you could guess which menu was from 1982 and which was from 2025. There are two major differences: Today the Ratty serves more cuisines and caters to more dietary restrictions than in the past. In fact, the Ratty offers a lot more food than it used to. The dinner menu from today includes only a fraction of all the dishes actually being served. For an increasingly diverse student body, it’s a good thing that more cuisines and diets are represented. 

At the same time, the two menus are both wordy, which has the effect of making the food seem fancier. You can do this to any dish. Describe it by breaking it into its constituent parts, and it comes across as fancier. A poptart? No, that’s a strawberry compote layered between a tender shortcrust pastry with a vanilla bean glaze. This is what memes are made of.

It’s a branding tactic meant to reinforce the University’s status and also for that portion of the student body well-versed in cultured butter and flaky salt. The fact that both menus are similarly descriptive suggests that Brown has always been interested in presenting itself as epicurean to appeal to a bourgeois student body.

Advertising its culinary arts isn’t new to Brown Dining either. A 1959 issue of the Pembroke Record includes a feature on the school’s newest chef who in addition to being a cook worked also a subsistence farmer with his wife and seven children. It’s emphasized that the chef, Mr. Kerensky, viewed cooking as an art and, as the author cleverly put it, really cared about food “from the ground up.”

That said, the Ratty can also be down to earth. Despite the occasional high-brow menu items, there were and are plenty of options for what Aizenberg might call simple food. Consider the baked chicken and a fish sandwich from these 1998 menus or the fact that you can always find a humble soup and a sandwich at the Ratty.

On the subject of taste, the food I eat from the Ratty is generally quite good, though occasionally bland. In the spirit of proving the Sharpe Refectory’s periodic mediocrity, here’s something unexceptional I ate last week. Excited to see something brothy at the Halal Station, I waddled back to my table cupping a bowl of steamy noodles, soy mushrooms and vegetables. I was disappointed, then, to discover that everything tasted of nothing. Some lime juice, chili oil or funk would have been desperately welcome. 

I’ll stop here. After all, badmouthing the Ratty is already a favorite pastime of many Brown students, and it has been for a while. A letter to the editor in a 1967 edition of the Pembroke Record lamented a new austere dining plan. It’s charmingly written, convincing and funny: The whipped potatoes were “not forthcoming” and they reference a hyperbolic potato famine that was “too blatant to escape notice.” It was signed by eleven students.

Aizenberg’s critique of schools becoming businesses is one that I can get behind, but the philosophy of the Ratty — serving a variety of dishes, some in vogue and some downright flavorless — remains the same as it did forty years ago.

Eleanor Barth Wu’26 can be reached at eleanor_barth_wu@brown.edu. Please send responses to this column to letters@browndailyherald.com and other opinions to opinions@browndailyherald.com.

ADVERTISEMENT


Powered by SNworks Solutions by The State News
All Content © 2025 The Brown Daily Herald, Inc.