MoJophobia

Emma Gase  

You’d think that after I had tried and conquered the salad empire, my culinary life was a trip to races after that. Well, you’d be assuming wrong. I did not conquer the salad empire that fateful night at Claim Jumper — the reality was I had tried one salad that had fried bits of noodle on it and was doused with a dressing that was really just a spicy, glorified version of peanut butter. Hardly fare of the foodies. It was early days, and I had some hard work ahead of me if I wanted to really triumph over the Epicurean Empire. At that point, I had merely landed on its shores, but there were still hordes of hostile natives and a whole continent ahead of me to explore before I could revel in any sort of true victory.

Enormous and intimidating boundaries aside, at least now there was an entire previously forbidden section of the menu now open to my perusal. My tastes had been officially diversified: I liked salad. If that didn’t connote adulthood, I didn’t know what did. I was cured of the Beige Diet—or so I thought.

Taste buds can change, but habits are tricky lil’ devils. You don’t just go from American cheese melted onto Einstein bagels to quinoa and kale chips overnight. This journey has been a long and tumultuous one, filled with spat-out bites, tentative dips of hummus, and joyous revelations.

As luck would have it, merely months after my salad breakthrough, I was on my way to freshman year in Ann Arbor, a place rife with unique dining options. Which leads me to the site in which I began to forge my eating identity, the mother lode of all freshman food consumption: MoJo dining hall.

I remember the first time I walked into MoJo. For fifteen solid minutes, all I could do was continuously make laps around the whole room. I gawked at the massive salad bar, the two giant Panini makers, the block ‘M’ waffle-makers, the ever-roasting rotisserie chicken, the make-your-own stir-fry station, the chronic supply of fresh, impossibly gooey cookies every twenty minutes, the giant vats of peanut butter. Talk about sensory overload.

So I did what any overwhelmed and intimidated freshman would have done: I made a beeline for the burgers and fries, ate it all in twelve minutes, and booked it right on outta there. So much for my expanded horizons. And making friends.

And so it went for the first two weeks. Kashi cereal for breakfast, turkey and cheese Panini for lunch, and a burger for dinner. I was so boring I nearly fell asleep mid-bite. I never ventured near the salad bar, or the make-your-own stir-fry station, or the rotisserie chicken (I didn’t seem to have a problem with the cookies, funnily enough). With all the change and discomfort of being a freshman at Michigan, my brain didn’t have the capacity to branch out, even if branching out was as insignificant as putzing around the salad bar. I couldn’t deal with the stress of making a salad while I was trying to understand game theory in PoliSci 160!

After two weeks of monotonous bread, cheese and cold cut combinations, I felt an overbearing sentiment only Paul Rudd’s character from “I Love You Man” could have understood: I needed to make some fucking friends. Luckily, ‘twas the season. Fall was kicking into gear, people were starting to get familiar, and I had tentatively chosen two people I could very well see as being real friends. And it just so happened that these two folks turned out to be some of the most knowledgeable foodies I had (and will ever) met. And it also just so happened that these fledgling friendships were forged over two-hour dinners in MoJo every night. It’s like Ringo and Joe Cocker wisely said: I get comfortable with the salad bar and expanded dining options with a little help from my friends. Or some variation of that.

I still remember that first meal I ate with my new friends. As they ventured to the salad bar and started placing foreign and terrifying items such as beets and hummus onto their plates, I took a deep breath and steeled myself to dive blindly into the unfamiliar. Following their lead, I made a salad for the first time in college. Well, perhaps “salad” is a loose word to describe what was really just a bowl consisting entirely of garbanzo beans, sesame seeds and a mountain of feta, but hey, it was a start. I had four years to get it right.