BU-5

After a long morning of creativity-​inspiring meetings at the European Commission’s cozy Beaulieu campus, you might feel in need of a tasty and nutritious lunch to help set you up for the brilliant collegial interactions that are sure to follow during the entire afternoon. In this positive mindset you head for building five («BU-​5» in the local lingo). Friendly guards make sure that nobody without a date-​stamped visitor’s badge gets admitted into the building hosting the restaurant, which makes you feel safe. Then, if you find your way to the restaurant — or canteen, rather — with an entrance that is not marked, you will find the dishes of the day on display, with posted scientific-​looking pie charts and ingredient tables. Once inside, the food counters are organized in a seemingly thought-​through way for the flow of the customers, which nonetheless somehow causes amorphous queues and interlocking lines of tray-​laden people to form. Once arrived at the food stand, the gender-​unbalanced serving staff carefully counts the number of potatoes being placed on your plate, along with whatever well-​measured but colorless protein component you choose. Signs in French tell you how forbidden it is to nibble from your plate before check out. Then you have to hold on to your tray and stand in line, in a narrow passageway, before you get to the cashier, where you pay a moderate cost of six euros or so. The queuing might take a while, causing alarm that your food might cool off before you get a chance to start eating it. Such worry will most likely turn out to have been unnecessary, however, since, at least in this instance, the food had never been heated above fridge temperature anyways, at a depth below the surface monolayer.