Loaves and Fishes

Virtualpolitik friend Virgil Griffith has come up with another great web application aimed at those in the higher education community who will do a lot in the pursuit of free food. As a graduate student, I know that the possibility that free food might be offered at an event to supplement my cost-effective pasta and potatoes grad school diet was often sufficient incentive for attendance at lectures and meetings. Part of the reason I attended the external review meeting of writing programs that eventually led to what has now been a ten-year career as a writing program administrator, when I was teaching a rhetoric of science class as a grad student, was the fact that I thought that the occasion of having visitors from other campuses would surely be reason for at least a plate of sandwiches. And until very recently I never presided over a staff meeting at which food was not served. Using Google calendar, Griffith has created Freefood at Cal Tech and Freefood at MIT.