Your Favorite Sandwich: Becca, Lettuce + Tomato

As the recent, partially employed college grad that I am, I am looking for work. It’s hard living at home with your parents, especially when your mother has all these expectations like grocery shopping and gardening and laundry. Don’t get me wrong, I am a capable, responsible adult. I just don’t want anyone telling me to be an adult. So, naturally, it's time to move out.   I found a job on a freelancing site called Upwork proofreading for some sports blogger. Knowing nothing about sports, I thought to myself, no problem, Rebecca, you’ve got this . I sold it, too. I was honest, I told them I’m not a fanatic, but I find sports fascinating, and I’m a great researcher. Soon as you know it, some random person (not the guy whose blog I applied to proofread) was interviewing me over Skype!   Upwork’s terms clearly state all interactions must happen on their platform but since I was so excited to get an interview, I was willing to disregard this red flag. Plus, their username was Harp...

On a Sunday night at Bryn Mawr College, most students are rushing to finish assignments or stumbling over paper topics. But in the college’s only environmentally conscious living co-operative, Batten House, spaghetti squash is a much more pressing issue.   Varuna, 22, and Sophie, 21, signed up to cook dinner for the house that night. They began slowly and with conviction, two friends using each and every week-old vegetable in the fridge for their meal. They prepped four pans for the stove with canola oil. Varuna, with one of her white t-shirt sleeves, pulled up and a dark green apron attempted to cut a hard spaghetti squash open with a long paring knife. Apparently, they tried a larger knife before but it couldn’t pierce the squash’s skin.   Sophie, sporting a light green shirt and white apron, lifted the squash in the air with the knife handle and looked at the large yellow mound quizzically. After yanking the knife out, Varuna succeeded in cutting the squash with a bread kni...

Four gloved fingers scrape butternut squash, farrow, and gooey cheese into a greased hotel pan. A navy lanyard hangs from his baggy pant pocket, dangling less than a foot away from red and white Nike sneakers. “If I don’t get black shoes” he chuckles, “my wife is going to kill me.”   Miguel Gayel is a cook at Bryn Mawr College’s Erdman Dining Hall. Everyone calls him Miguel. He’s been working there for about 18 years. “A long time,” he jokes. He takes a long stainless steel paddle out off of the dirty dish cart and scrubs it clean with a steel wool sponge before dipping it in a blue, then pink sanitizing solution. “Tonight’s dinner is beet tartine, grilled chicken breast, roasted cauliflower, and farrow butternut squash,” he said.   He rushes around prepping both tonight and tomorrow night’s dinner, each with different silver paddles that look as though they belong on a canoe. He dips a spoon into a vegan cheese sauce. “Mmmmm,” he said, “that’s good,” a common phrase for him. ...