Ye Olde Waffle Shop
There is a great deal of talk in the current election cycle about what is real and what is fake. Who is a real American? Where is the "real" Virginia? Who is more "real"-Joe the Plumber or the latte liberal? It seems to be a watershed year for reality.
Locally the Wofford environmental club has been focusing on the idea of what is real as well. They've been talking about "Real Food."
The Wofford students are part of a country-wide effort to address sustainability and social systems through the food we eat. At Yale University last year there was a Real Food Summit, and the students released a Real Food Declaration.
In our food choices conscious college students nationwide are beginning to see reflections of ethics and issues of social justice in how food is produced, prepared, and consumed.
By "Real Food" the students mean food that isn't processed, trucked in thousands of miles, prepared before-time, or altered genetically. They're working to get the college food services to look at their choices for campus food. They're reading and studying and planning rallies. They want to reintroduce food awareness into an institutional food system that for decades has worked on the idea that cheap and abundant are the only essential values.
This concern with food realities made me think a little more about food on a recent trip to Chapel Hill. When was my eating at its highest level of reality? Did I encounter any real food on my trip?
I'll admit I'm a little old fashioned. When I think of a higher food reality I always focus on what I've come to call "slow food," or "family-owned food," Mom & Pop restaurants. These are the places I prefer to eat my "real food" if you give me a choice. For me the fact that a restaurant is old or locally owned covers a number of "fake food" sins such as distribution or origin of produce or even quality of ingredients.
On my trip I had a morning free, and I walked up Franklin Street, the main drag for the university, looking for some place to eat breakfast. Breakfast is when I feel closest to reality. I love the early mornings and I often want a full breakfast when I'm traveling. There seems to be more reality available if what you're looking for is eggs any style, potatoes, and toast, comfort food.
Where in Chapel Hill could I eat what was real? I could eat at Starbucks or Carabou Coffee. The Franklin Street locations were both busy and hip, but there was something unreal about them as I walked past. These coffee shops hummed with creative-class activity, but I knew the muffins were the same in every corporate coffee house, no matter whether you were in Chapel Hill or in an airport.
I would not spend my morning in Chapel Hill eating this sort of fake food. I was on a breakfast quest. I would find something real, and so I walked on, trusting my old food instincts.
It's then I encountered Ye Olde Waffle Shop, a Franklin Street Chapel Hill tradition since the seventies. There's nothing hip about the place. It's a hole-in-the-wall booth and stool shop with no budget for makeovers. What you see is exactly what you got 35 years ago.
I found a booth near the front with a full view of the busy kitchen, and I watched a bored student waiter doing a crossword puzzle. There was something very real about that student up early, fiddling with a crossword puzzle in Ye Olde Waffle Shop.
And the food? You know, nothing out of the ordinary, eggs over-easy, hash browns, whole wheat toast, waffles cooked in a griddle purchased during the Carter Administration. I ordered the egg platter and felt the comfort descend around me.
The coffee was real as well-steaming hot in a chipped ceramic white mug. My test of reality often comes down to the heft of those white mugs when I find them.
Reality is a complex concept. It's something that seems to have been lost on some of our politicians. Sometimes it's complicated and diverse, and it's impossible to reduce to doctrines or ideologies. Other times it's as easy to spot as Ye Olde Waffle Shop.