AS ALWAYS, LIFE IMITATES TOM WOLFE: Students at Lena Dunham’s college offended by lack of fried chicken:
Gastronomically correct students at Oberlin College — alma mater of Lena Dunham — are filling the school newspaper with complaints and demanding meetings with campus dining officials and even the college president.
General Tso’s chicken was made with steamed chicken instead of fried — which is not authentically Chinese, and simply “weird,” one student bellyached in the Oberlin Review.
Others were up in arms over banh mi Vietnamese sandwiches served with coleslaw instead of pickled vegetables, and on ciabatta bread, rather than the traditional French baguette.
“It was ridiculous,” gripes Diep Nguyen, a freshman who is a Vietnam native.
Worse, the sushi rice was undercooked in a way that was, according to one student, “disrespectful” of her culture. Tomoyo Joshi, a junior from Japan, was highly offended by this flagrant violation of her rice. “I f people not from that heritage take food, modify it and serve it as ‘authentic,’ it is appropriative,” she said.
Oberlin’s black student union joined in the fray this month by staging a protest outside Afrikan Heritage House, an on-campus dorm.
The cafeteria there wasn’t serving enough vegan and vegetarian options and had failed to make fried chicken a permanent feature on the Sunday night menu, the school newspaper reported.
The whole article is a riot, and reads like outtakes from I Am Charlotte Simmons. But then, I’m from a simpler era — I don’t recall General Tso’s Chicken, sushi and vegan options in my school’s cafeteria, which largely doled out barely edible food that seemed like Civil War surplus. Has there ever been a generation of college crybullies simultaneously so spoiled, and so angry?