There are rules that every college student is expected to follow. You can’t have candles, you need to be aware of your volume level in the dorms, and don’t drink if you’re underage. However, there are some rules that remain unspoken, until someone breaks them and the school has to say something. For example, you wouldn’t think a school would need to ban playing soccer inside a residential building’s small weight room/yoga studio. However, that’s what my college needed to do after some students broke the lights by kicking soccer balls up into the air one too many times.
And if you’re Cornell University, then you need to issue a policy banning wild game meat processing in the dorms.
Last year, two Cornell students made headlines after getting caught skinning and carving a black bear in a communal kitchen to make homemade pastrami. After hunting a black bear two hours away from Ithaca, NY where Cornell University is located, the two students brought the carcass to their dorm kitchen, intending to carve and skin it there. One of the students involved claimed it was due to an unexpected issue with the friend’s house they planned on taking it at first. Upon carving the bear, the two students froze the meat in a communal freezer, and a complaint was lodged shortly after. I have to wonder if the complaint was because a student witnessed the skinning and carving of the black bear, or because a student was annoyed by the sudden lack of freezer space.
An investigation by the police ensued, and the students were found not guilty of any wrongdoing. The two students hunted the bear completely legally, and the processing of the meat was not found to be in violation of any health codes in New York. Nonetheless, Cornell issued a statement and new policy stating that processing wild game meat in the dorms is now strictly banned, so no pastrami for the students, I guess.
The dorm kitchen, in which the processing took place, also closed down for two days while Cornell’s cleaning staff sanitized the room. It’s times like these that I’m glad my college is small and quiet. And the biggest kitchen issue is the smell of burnt popcorn, not raw bear meat.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all for sustainability and a farm-to-table lifestyle, but processing bear meat in a dorm is going a bit too far. I mean, I wouldn’t be too happy to walk into my resident hall’s kitchen to microwave some ramen and instead be met with a bear carcass. But that’s just me. All in all, I’m glad a few stray dirty dishes left over in the sink are the extent of my college kitchen woes.