A Harvard BeTRAYal

It seems like everyone around here lately has been jumping on the solar-powered band wagon of sustainability. That is, until the sun runs out! [Insert Nobel Peace Prize here]. But who is really taking measurable steps? Prestige and Mobility care about sustainability and are putting our carbon credits where our mouths are. We plant a tree each time we kill a dolphin or eat a Panda Burger (mmm... Panda Burgers, only $4.95 at b.good when also presenting a copy of The Harvard Voice). We tried to start a wind farm in Adams A, using fans all powered by other fans plugged into the wall. (The data is still inconclusive.) And of course, we threw out all of the free condoms lest a duck or an Isis girl should unfortunately choke on one.

Yet we don’t look at the world through rose-colored sunocles. We know Chiappini’s not being sustainable whilst destroying countless flowers with the “she loves me, she loves me not” game. [1] So imagine our surprise and delight when Adams Dining Hall introduced tray-less dining. We had always been in favor of reducing things to be more sustainable: paperless notebooks, waterless aqueducts, ice cream-less sundaes. Shit, man, we stopped going to section freshman year to help out Great Mother Gaia.

But even our valiant efforts couldn’t affect the painful food waste and water runoff from tray washing, which is starving seals in the third-world, not to mention maintaining the funding of Diamond Magazine. Somehow there are still students who fail to see tray-less dining’s clear benefits.

Don’t believe the historical revisionism of the tray lobby! Clearly, when John Winthrop founded the Massachusetts Tray Colony and guaranteed the right to bear trays, he could never have envisioned the world we lived in today! There were no trays at the first Thanksgiving! The Indians taught pilgrims about maize and tray-less dining. At the very least we could have no trays at three of five meals: a tre-fifths compromise, though that was ruled unconstitutional in the seminal case of Roe v. Tray. It’s a simple case of traykle-down economics. Let’s not forget that trays nearly pushed us to nuclear war in the Tray of Pigs fiasco. When will enough be enough?

We need not only look to the past for lessons about the evil of trays. As the Adams House REP rep said, “The goal of tray-less dining is not to make you eat less; it is to make you waste less.” Let this be a stern warning to all those who take Marsala chicken only as weights to keep their napkins from flying away. These fools can’t see the forest through the trees (because they cut them all down to print this issue of FM). 

Clearly the tray lobby knows that if we had to make extra tray-less trips to the servery, we would grow strong and supremely coordinated, balancing our crispy fish sandwiches, bowls of Frosted Mini Spooners, cups of chocolate milk, and organic pasta dishes. They plot instead to fatten us up, dulling our minds and bodies to their (crimson-is-crimson-not-green) treachery.

But what the fat cats at the tray corporations won’t tell Joe Harvard is that it takes as much water to wash one tray as it does to wash five. FACT: That is impossible. FACT: The tray lobby was responsible for the sinking of the Spanish Armada, the Dreyfus Affair and stagflation.

My brothers and sisters, man is born free but everywhere he is in trays! We can’t sustain this tray-ful life. A man who cannot bear his own dishes is no man at all. Throw down your tray and take up your red-spiced chicken on a plate of freedom!

[1] 774.218.8298