The Takeout Box Swindle and the Latest Bunk in Trayless Dining

The filthiness of the takeout boxes is the latest story to be told about the politicization of our food choices.

At Collins, they are now reusing takeout boxes and giving them back to students. Currently, they charge 50 cents per takeout box and now, if you return your takeout box, they will simply rinse them out and sell them again.

I doubt very much that the cost of washing these takeout boxes was factored into this supposedly waste reducing policy. Further, I've washed a few things in my time. Wouldn't it be easier to wash out and reuse plastic trays (particularly when they are already purchased) than to rewash and reuse styrofoam takeout boxes. What's worse is that students don't know they are getting takeout boxes that others have already been eaten on!

There have got to be better ways to reduce waste. One such way is to let students take the food that they would otherwise waste out of the dining hall, rather than forcing them to get rid of it.

The more I look into the ban on trayless dining that has sweeped the campus, the more suspicious the motivations I see underlying it. This propaganda piece in favor of trayless dining really makes me wonder if the real reason Aramark and Bon Appetit favor it is that it helps their bottom line.

Obviously getting rid of trays would reduce waste. So too would eliminating plates.

Now I'm off the meal plan and so there's a limited effect that I can have on this, but I pledge that everytime I eat in any of the dining halls I'm going to be leaving my plate at my seat until the policy is changed.

Remembering 9-11 Eight Years Later

I do not like to talk about 9-11. I perceive what Peggy Noonan talked about in today's Wall Street Journal is about right.

We, who were in middle school, do not talk about 9-11. It is one of those shared things of which we do not speak because for many of us it marked the end of something entirely -- childhood. Many people compare this day to our generation's Kennedy assassination or Pearl Harbor, but I would disagree. It was conceivable at the time that there would be a new president after Kennedy and there would be an end to the war with Japan. There really is no end to this war because in all likelihood there was no beginning. Savages and civilized peoples have always been at war. The only problem is that civilization has afforded savages all the tools and weapons of modernity.

There was some kind of powerless that befell lots of adults that day and in the weeks subsequent. As a newspaper boy, I noticed that more and more of my customers sat on the porch waiting for the news to arrive. Everyone -- from high school kids to ninety year old retired firemen -- seemed to be giving themselves a crash course on Osama bin Laden, Afghanistan, and Islam.

Many of my friends remember this time as one of the few that they ever saw their parents cry. Coming home on that autumn day a few days after school had started, you could sense that this year and all of the years that would come after it would be different.

I don't remember much of what my parents said that day. I remember my Mom crying and going to bed early and my dad coming home late from work, telling me in that stern, sad voice he uses only when he wants me to grasp the way the world really works. It's a tone his voice takes only when our family experiences tragedy.

He tried to talk to me and told me that this likely meant that the country was at war and that this would be a big war. He hugged me, again another rare event and he asked me to help explain things to my siblings and not to be too sad. I told him I would.

Time and again, friends have described 9-11 as a bubble popping event. But it was no such things for me. As a kid with a mom who had had cancer and would have it again, I knew that people were mortal and that random, awful, things happen to good people everyday and that there wasn't much you could do about it. It was one of those moments where I have been grateful that my parents didn't have cable and so the images, broadcast over and over again, could only be described on the radio.

But if it was a bubble popping event, it wasn't immediately clear that many kids had understood it as such. Over the next few days, occasionally, a tear or two would fall from the corner of my eye, but the only girl who was crying was my friend, Jill Beach who I, sitting as I did near the tissue box, gave tissues to. Jill was also a kid who had lived outside of the bubble. Ever since she was a young kid, she suffered from a rare childhood cancer that was never fully beaten back. (In the end, she lost that battle.) And though I knew that I could never feel what Jill was feeling, I often looked to her as a kind of barometer of when things were bad. Every indication was that that they were.

I think back to that day everytime I leave Boston for Los Angeles. Both American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 originated in Boston and the flight between LA and Boston is one I often take.

Everytime I walk into Logan Airport and stare up at the camera, like Mohammed Atta, I cannot help but feel a great chill come over me. When I was younger, I was always excited to go traveling, but now I try to stay up the entire night beforehand so that I am too tired to let my nerves get the better of me. (I suspect that once I turn 21, I'll turn to other forms of relaxation.)

I look up at the camera that overlooks the terminal each time and wonder if this'll be the last flight I take. And though I am not very religious, I say a prayer, "Lord, give me the strength to do what I must, should evil be calling."

We're told that New Yorkers have gotten a lot more vigilant about the threats to their security and rightly so, but still, I sometimes wonder if the residents of the city I love have gotten the message. And this video, makes me inclined to think that at least some of them have forgotten.

Last time I was in Boston to mark 9-11, I went to Daniel Lewin Square where I laid some flowers. Daniel M. Lewin was an American-born Israeli entrepreneur who, a 2002 FAA memo suggests, was killed by hijacker Satam al-Suqami, after he tried to foil their hijacking. While a lot of people like the narrative of United 93, I've always found the story of Daniel Lewin to be especially powerful. It says something profound about us that the first person to resist was an Israeli.

In truth, what 9-11 demonstrates to me is that, like the Israelis, everyone of us is a target. We are hated not for who we are, but from where we happen to live. From Christine Hanson, a 2-year old of Groton, Mass, to 85 year-old Robert Grant North, of Lubec Maine and all 2994 other fatalities, we are all targets and the moment we forget, they'll be another 9-11.

FIRE Smacks Deb Wood for Her Lack of Tolerance for "Stupid Drunks"

The Torch, the blog of The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), points out that this Deb Wood incident is just one of the many, many instances where we have tolerance for me, but not for thee. Here's what Adam Kissel writes, in part,

That's right, all this education about stereotyping and inclusiveness and diversity has not kept Debra Wood from using a slur against people who engage in "substantial drinking." Wood has declared to everyone at the Claremont Colleges that it is OK to stereotype such people as "stupid drunks." Of course, calling someone a "stupid drunk" is protected speech, especially since it's usually just a matter of opinion. But it shows that Debra Wood really has learned nothing about being "supportive" and "inclusive" of people who engage in substantial drinking.

In all seriousness, the Claremont Colleges are out of control. I still don't understand what is supposed to be the "impact" of "Hillary is a foxy lesbian." If you want any evidence that political correctness is alive and well, just go to Claremont, where they notify Campus Safety and send consortium-wide e-mails whenever some utterance might seem the slightest bit offensive to anybody. Public opprobrium is the best way to deal with offensive or racist speech, but Claremont's policy is well into the realm of the ridiculous. The infantilization of students is no way to prepare them to participate as adults in a free society.

The National Association of Scholars Mentions Claremont Conservative in the Trayless Debate

The Claremont Conservative was mentioned on the website of the National Association of Scholars when I wrote something against the tray bans on campus. They wrote a lengthy and good article against tray bans. They argue that the real reason we have had trays banned is to inconvenience us into supporting bogus politics. Here are a few mentions.

That third rationale, “social awareness,” is the most important goal. Like the campus-driven movement to ban bottled water, trayless dining is mostly symbolic. Those who seek to use higher education as an incubator for the sustainability movement know that to transform people’s mindsets, they need only require small changes in everyday habits. When we are confronted with trivial daily lifestyle choices, we are constantly reminded of how we’ve been told we ought to behave.

Leaders of other activist movements have used this technique before. Feminists succeeded in getting us all to stop and worry over titles and third person pronouns (Is it ‘he or she’? Mailperson? Ms.?). They also achieved the substitution of the word gender for sex, signifying that “sexual identity” is socially constructed, not biologically assigned.

In the same way, when college students juggle plates and cups and silverware on their way through the cafeteria, they are obliged to think about sustainability every day at every meal. Sustainability advocates know that trayless dining is not going to change the world; they achieve victory simply by getting inside people’s heads.

Because sustainability initiatives seem so trivial, most people don’t think it is harmless, as illustrated by one person’s response to our list of ten reasons to oppose the campus sustainability movement:

I am unconvinced...As a counterexample, see the University of Chicago’s page on sustainability on campus: http://sustainability.uchicago.edu/. There’s nothing more controversial than recycling batteries and minimizing the use of leaf blowers.

Yes, Chicago’s webpage, with an eco-tip of the month and information about this year’s Earth Week, seems perfectly inoffensive. And many sustainability programs arestrictly concerned with its environmental stewardship aspect, not its social and economic aspects. But at the same time, the sustainability movement is unmistakably bent on changing attitudes, outlooks, and behavior. And like the feminists, sustainability advocates have been successful in their mission to act as our conscience. We are reminded of this every time we catch ourselves wondering, “Oh wait, can I say that?” or “Hmm...is this eco-ethical?”

Given the disdain for the tray-liban, I think it's time to reinstituted the old anti-ban Facebook group, "Tray Stupide! Give us Back Our Trays."

And I think it's time that we protested. (Seriously, why can the far left have all the fun?)

Here were some of the slogans we brainstormed when we first created this group several

Tray Guevara (Bryce Gerard CMC '11), General Petrayus (Aditya Bindal CMC '11), and I, the Traywalker, came up with some of these hilarious jibes last year at the Tray-liban.

• Give me tray or give my money back!
• From time to time, the tray of liberty must be watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
• They can take our trays, but we will break their plates. (Or would that be a plate crime?)
• Support Tray Rights! Tray-Plate Alliance!
• The North American Free Tray Agreement.
• Free Traybet!
• Ask not what you can do for your tray. Ask what your tray can do for you.
• Hey, hey, Pomona, what do you say? How many trays did you steal today?
• Trays are just another word for nothing left to lose.
• The Lorax speaks for the trays.
• Fight the Trayliban!
• Stop the Trayophobes! They want to Pray-The-Tray-Away!
• Join the ProleTrayriat