Is it right to have students bring cake and cold drinks for classes? Where I study, it is normal even for advanced courses that the instructor for a class makes a "cake list" consisting of student names who each bring a cake (it could be other stuff, like cold drinks, but usually it's cake) to share with the rest of the class.

Is this acceptable behavior? I can think of many drawbacks of such an initiative (not all of them apply to me personally, but some do)


While not obligatory, it requires students to pronounce, in front of all other students, that they do not wish to participate. This is an awkward position to put somebody else in, especially during the first day of class, and it gets worse when somebody actually brings a cake: does the person who refused to be on the list get to eat the cake? Even if they do, I am sure they'll feel a bit uncomfortable doing so.
Classes should be focused on study, not on eating stuff. 
Some students will find it annoying that while they're trying to do a hard problem or read a difficult section in a book, everybody else is eating and enjoying a cake which is also being passed back and forward, adding to the distruption. 
Some students will be on diets or other health plans. They could refuse the cake, but why force them to make that choice in the first place? For many, this is a known problem.
Cakes and cold drinks can dirty the place up, with crumbs, wet marks, and so on. Somebody else will use the classroom after us, and at the end of the day, the cleaning people will have to do some work in there too. It should be left as clean as possible for them.
Many hundreds of years ago I had a class on "theory of computation"* that met at a wretchedly inconvenient time: 8:00 AM on Sunday mornings, for four hours.**  Someone always brought coffee and someone else always brought donuts.  However, there was no list, only volunteers.  Arrangements were informal and made at the end of each class meeting.

Conclusion: List, bad; volunteers, good.

*With the polished and appropriately hideous book by Derick Wood.

**This was in the United States.  The class meeting time was an experiment, never again repeated.