About a year ago, everyone at my work was sort of excited because Restaurant Associates, which famously feeds (‘feeds’) the employees of Conde Nast, was taking over our cafeteria. The excitement lasted until we tasted the first soggy spear of asparagus from the new, seemingly improved but actually still pretty much just as crappy salad bar. It looked good, but it was still cafeteria food! Turns out, cafeteria food is cafeteria food, no matter how you slice it.
I try to avoid the caf as much as possible, but the one meal that I buy there consistently is breakfast. Specifically, this is what I buy: an english muffin, toasted, with butter and marmalade on one half and peanut butter on the other — yes, every day. I’m the kind of person who likes having routines, okay? So you can imagine how frightened and alienated I felt on the morning that I walked into the cafeteria and was greeted by a new label on the marmalade tub. Apparently, ‘marmalade’ as a concept was too difficult for some cafeteria patrons to grapple with. The new term for this substance?
“ORANGE JELLY.”
In retrospect, it becomes clear to me that ‘orange jelly day’ marked the beginning of the end. Soon the marmalade orange jelly was showing up less and less frequently. Often it wouldn’t be there at all, and I’d have to modify my routine with inferior stand-ins: strawberry jam, and once, grape jelly, the kind that the one kid who always had fun-sized Fritos and a Little Debbie cake in his lunch used to have on his Wonderbread sandwich in elementary school. And lately, there hasn’t been any marmalade. At all. EVER.

So if you’re curious, that’s the reason I’m leaving my job here.