More than a Meal: The Cultural Imaginary and Practices Behind Student Access to University Canteens in Milan

University canteens occupy a structurally significant position within European higher education, functioning simultaneously as food security infrastructures, socioeconomic equalizers, and community-building spaces. Yet, access to these services remains deeply uneven, shaped by financial constraints, logistical barriers, and a frequently underexplored cultural and symbolic dimension that precedes and overrides direct experiential evaluation. Drawing on 56 semi-structured qualitative interviews conducted with university students in Milan between April and May 2025, this paper investigates how students organize and experience their midday lunch break and what motivates them to access or exclude themselves from the university canteen service. The findings reveal that the student sample departs substantially from the dominant framing in the contemporary literature of the canteen as an existential food-security resource, instead deploying a range of domestic and commercial food tactics that bypass institutional catering entirely. More significantly, the data demonstrates that canteen avoidance is driven less by objective assessments of food quality or pricing than by a stratification of memories in which childhood memories of institutional dining spaces trigger pre-emptive rejection of the university facility before any direct engagement takes place. Against this backdrop, peer socialization emerges as a particularly salient counterforce for overriding both affective aversion and economic and logistical inconvenience, symbolically transforming the canteen from a regimented site of institutional constraint into a shared territory of collective belonging. Taken together, these findings suggest that improving canteen access requires intervention not only at the level of food quality and pricing, but at the level of spatial culture, service typology, and the culinary imagery that students carry with them to campus.