Come Together for a Wonderful Academic Feast on Agriculture

Last week I went traveling in Yilan with students from University B in the Bay Area. The Lanyang Museum and the scallion drying sheds of Sanxing Township were both quite interesting, and the food was even better. For lunch we had the Chinese and Western buffet at Silks Place Yilan, and for dinner we had Yilan cuisine at Jun Old-Time Restaurant. The thoughtfulness of the organizers could be seen everywhere. Yet faced with a table full of dishes that were perfect in color, aroma, and taste, the group instead showed the weary look of people who had lost all interest. After all, they had eaten similar banquet meals for five days straight, and even an iron stomach could not withstand such torment. Looking at the seafood on the table that no one wanted to touch with chopsticks, a scholar beside me asked, "Is this really necessary?"

Good question. Is this really necessary?

As it happens, seminars in Taiwan have always had an unwritten rule: no matter what the quality of the papers presented at the seminar, the tea snacks in the middle of the meeting are the key to determining whether the meeting succeeds or fails. Just imagine: if a seminar's papers are brilliant, plus there are a few plates of decent snacks, people will naturally be able to continue the topics they had not discussed to their heart's content in the venue earlier. Even if the papers are not good, a few plates of decent snacks will still make people mutter quietly to themselves, "Ah, thank goodness for you." Conversely, even the most exciting seminar will be severely slapped in the face by inadequate desserts. That is where the saying comes from: "The quality of lingzhi lies in its polysaccharides; the quality of a seminar lies in its tea snacks."

In fact, it is not only seminars. Even ordinary academic talks are deeply influenced by lunch bento boxes. I do not know when it started, but lectures at universities across Taiwan all chose the lunch hour as the time for talks, and the bento became the bait the department used to attract students to come to activities. If more people came, the delivered bento could even be upgraded. From the students' point of view, at the lunch hour they could get a free bento, and as long as the talk was not too boring, enduring it for an hour or two to support the department's event could still count as loyalty and righteousness. But as such events were held for a long time, I do not know whether it was because everyone got tired of all the bento, or because the tacit understanding between students and the department grew thinner and thinner. In any case, more and more students turned and left as soon as they finished the bento, leaving the scholar onstage looking utterly stunned. So now the announcements in campus lecture systems, besides the "meat/vegetarian" option, also carry warnings like "Students, please be polite and do not leave the venue immediately after finishing your bento," a warning that makes one unsure whether to cry or laugh.

Of course, Taiwan is not a special case. I still remember attending an international seminar in Shanghai more than ten years ago. A group of people, after being bombarded by more than ten courses of large dishes, were already planning to hold their bellies and get up to leave, when the server suddenly brought out glossy braised pork knuckles and white noodles tossed with scallion oil, afraid that the scholars attending the conference would not eat enough. And when I attended an annual meeting in Hong Kong, China the year before last, I also encountered a situation where a group of people had already stopped using their chopsticks and were chatting, while dishes kept coming nonstop. On such occasions, I cannot help but think: Were these people just now seriously criticizing capitalism's overproduction and overconsumption?

Of course I know that, faced with a table full of delicacies, attendees have little room to comment, and everything can only follow the host's arrangements. So what do the organizers think? Do we really need one large bento per person, and after eating, wipe our greasy mouths and line up in a long queue to dump food waste? Do we really need plate after plate of small tea snacks, but from north to south all we eat are panna cotta, cha siu pastries, egg tarts, and sandwiches with no local character? Do we really need night after night of large tables of dishes, while each person eats and thinks about how to revise the slides for the next day's presentation, so that they can barely swallow and do not know how to face the toasts coming at them? Do we really need this kind of academic feast?

Someone said, "These problems reflect that Taiwan's academic circles need professional seminar outsourcing services," but I think these problems reflect that we actually do not quite understand what we ourselves need, and even reflect a certain vigorous yet exhausted academic culture of ours.