I was sitting in the dining hall last weekend when the topic of Wilbur desserts came up- why are they always the same, when the rest of the meals vary so much?


The same cookies, raspberry tarts, pecan bars, and lemon bars show up every night, and they're pretty good, but everyone seems to be getting a little bored. However, I never put much thought into it until our Resident Fellow gave us a little insight.

"It's because those are baked, not cooked," he said. "It's union stuff- they are allowed to cook, but not bake, so they have to bring in all the baked stuff from other places."


Everyone was a little confused, and the general consensus was that the distinction was useless splitting of hairs. "Aren't they the same thing?" someone asked, and I remembered our discussion on the first day of class.  I hadn't yet read Lehrer's piece about the culinary triangle, so I couldn't precisely describe the difference technically. "No, baked things are sweet..." another friend tried to answer the question. "Well, except, like, baked potatoes... but they must be allowed to bake those, right?" It kind of became a bothersome mystery, and no one could arrive at a clean justification.

So I did some research, and found two unions that might be involved:

1. The Bakery, Confection, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers Union. Here's a link to their constitutional statement of purpose.

http://bctgm.org/about-us/history-purpose/    

2. UNITE HERE Food Service

http://www.unitehere.org/fs/



As much as I searched, I could find no information about these unions in relation to Stanford Dining Halls, but it certainly got me thinking about how cooking words are defined. Since the US doesn't have a commission like France's to standardize the meanings of words, the terms "cooking" and "baking" have a certain amount of ambiguity. However, the rights of labor unions are legal matters- other campuses like Harvad and Yale have undergone recent UNITE Here protests, and Stanford's bake/cook dispute is evidence of how definitions can effect more than the way we talk.

The BCTWGM union defines their domain as: "workers in bakeries, candy, cereal, sugar, grain mills, tobacco plants, food processing and manufacturing facilities and other related occupations related to these industries." So would Wilbur Dining technically be a "bakery" if they baked cookies instead of importing them? Let's take another look at Lehrer's table of cooking words:

Okay, so based on this table, we will have to refine the definition that Wilbur can "cook but not bake," because, according to Lehrer, baking is a hyponym of cooking. The best solution I can manage is that the Wilbur dining staff is allowed to perform all of the actions of cooking, except baking. But where does that leave roasting, as it partially falls under the baking category? And what about those baked potatoes?