A preface to lunch "Think about this" - I wanted some tea not scuzz in my glass

Author: James O'Brien

This week, thin white cards with words on them were placed in those plastic holder things on the dining hall tables. They said "Think about this…" and argued about tiny dining hall budgets. Here are my ignorant thoughts, which I invite you to respond to in op-ed form so that we can fill space in next week's fine edition of The Campus.

One of the "Think about this" cards told me that the food budget for each student per day is $3.84. Roughly $1.28 per meal. My reaction to this was: a. Gadzooks! and b. Either Dining Services is performing feats of wizardry to obtain the cheapest food in the Milky Way, or several hundred students are on a hunger strike over the pathetic amount of money allotted to feed them.

I think that putting these cards on the tables was a mistake. No student likes to think about how much money their parents are paying so that they can read some books, screw around and eat a daily fill which is equivalent price-wise to a Baconator meal at Wendy's. And yet there it is in front of you - "Comprehensive fee in 2007: $46,910." If we really want to get a conversation started, maybe they could put a pie chart of the entire Middlebury College budget on our dining tables, not just the anemic dining budget.

One card says, "You can help by returning any dishes that you see out of place." Completely ignore this request. Thanks to the surge in returned dishware, several tainted cups and dishes are back in circulation. This is bad. For the two months prior to being returned, these plates and cups had been in some kid's closet soaking up stale bong water behind his skis and his didgeridoo. I, King James, do not want to eat off didgeridoo plates. Now, I have to scrutinize each plate and glass like it's a Making the Band contestant before I put anything into it. This month, I decided to "suck it up," and I ended up drinking tea out of a cup that seemed to have traces of someone's hot fudge sundae on the bottom. I am now sick with multiple ear infections. If the dishwasher can't clean these stains, I don't trust it to kill germs. And now I can't hear.

Of course, correlation is not causation, so there is no way to prove that my sickness has anything to do with dish-scuzz. In the same vein, the friendly "Think about this" cards are boasting that the removal of trays from the dining hall caused this year's compost output to be .04 percent/meal less than last year's. You can't prove that tray removal lowered the compost output. What if there were just a lot of fat/not-fasting-in-outrage students who graduated last year? And who cares about compost output? The .04 percent reduction in compost has very little to do with our "carbon footprint." If food is in the compost pile, fine. Who cares how big the pile is? Eventually, it all goes back into the ground. If we eat the food and the waste ends up in the septic tank, isn't that actually worse for the environment? To summarize, getting rid of the trays saves dishwasher soap. That's it. Also, I don't like scuzz.

As I write this, I am staring at one, two … 10 pieces of dishware that have accumulated in my room. They are all scuzz-ridden, and I'm afraid to return them for fear that, in some cruel twist of fate, I will end up using them at dinner the next night. None of these pieces of dishware are mine. I bring them into my room after some jerk leaves them in the hall bathroom and, more importantly, after I've had to endure a week's worth of our janitor's idle threats written on the mirror in red marker. "Return these or I will talk to your commons dean," the mirror usually says. I always want to write a counter-note that reads something like:

"Dear Madame, our commons dean has more important things to do than worry about one dish in the bathroom. I have escorted the dish into my room, and now it can happily accumulate dust and take up shelf space that could have been devoted to a pornographic DVD - or a useless $60 book that I don't feel like selling back to the bookstore for 1/20 of its worth. Ahem. In this lovely shelf spot, your beloved dish will rest, so that I can gaze upon it daily and further develop my attitude problem. Love, James."

This note is too big to fit on the bathroom mirror, so I just take the dishes.

James O'Brien '10 is an English major from Medfield, Mass.