Ethnographic Fieldnotes on Food

Last week I went to the University of Redlands Commons alone 3 times to eat dinner. I went three times and all three times were very awkward. I felt very out of place eating alone because everyone else was eating with someone else. The only people who weren’t eating with someone else were doing homework. I noticed that if people were doing homework they went to the section on the commons that served sandwiches and to-go food rather than in the more formal dining area. The more formal dining area had larger groups of people in it. The longer I sat there by myself the more out of place I felt. I knew I was doing homework, but didn’t feel like it or look like it to others.
This experience was already strange for me because I live off campus. I don’t tend to eat on campus, and if I do it is between classes when not many people are there. One of the things was I was expecting to observe before going into the common was a gender divide; I thought that genders would sit together more often than not. I made this assumption based on what I observed in my classes and living arrangements. I thought that many people would go to lunch with their roommates. My assumption was false. I saw many groups of people with both many female and male members. The only time I really saw the gender divide was if it was a group of two. Those groups were mainly same sex, I concluded that this was because the action of eating dinner with someone of the opposite sex may be considered a date. There wasn’t a gender divide in food choice either. I thought that mainly women would go to the salad bar but from what observed both genders went to the salad bar pretty equally.
I also notice a temperal change when it comes to the choice and formality of food. Om my third time of going to the commons I went at around 7:30 because one of my classes was dismissed early. While I was sitting at the commons I noticed that more people were going to the café area than to the other. More students were getting food to go and some came to eat in their pajamas. This was different from the earlier times because they seemed to be much more informal when coming to eat. It was also more common to see the genders come in same sex groups later at night. But, the act of eating was still a very social action.
The social aspect of food is what became most apparent to me while doing this ethnographic exercise. Even when I heard about the exercise I thought it was going to be very strange eating by myself. I always tend to eat with someone else, and if someone else is eating I tend to get something to. I felt very lonely eating by myself, and people thought it was strange that I was doing so. I even put off doing this assignment because I knew I was going to feel uncomfortable. Our society uses food to celebrate, to be used a lot of time on dates, and a common get together with friends. Eating alone outside of my home felt very strange.