After two long and grueling years of COVID and Styrofoam lunches, the dining hall has reinstated plates and silverware, signifying a big step in returning to our pre-COVID routine. This is obviously a huge change, and although we were off to a bit of a rough start (our student body accidentally threw away dozens of plates between the first two days of school), this change has been going pretty smoothly. But why does this matter? Well, let’s quickly crunch some numbers. Between the Middle and Upper School, we have just over 780 students. Assuming all of those students take 1 Styrofoam box per lunch, that amounts to 3,900 Styrofoam boxes per week or 140,400 boxes in a typical 180-day school year. Now obviously I am no mathematician; however, I think anyone can see that this is a lot of waste that we are now able to cut out of our routine.

The thing is, for the students, this change requires essentially no effort, but this isn’t true for everyone. Our incredible dining hall staff has been putting in extra effort every single day to wash all of these plates and silverware, and really, they are the ones responsible for this change. Not only are they providing us with excellent food every single day, but they are the ones doing the extra work to reduce our school’s waste and help the earth. Now it’s our turn. The least we can do and the least we should be doing is showing them our appreciation for all they do for us.

This can mean lots of different things. Gratitude does not need to be expressed by verbally thanking every single member of the dining hall staff at lunch, that’s nice but perhaps overkill, especially over time. What gratitude does mean is personal responsibility for the mess that you create. I do not believe there is a single person on this planet that deserves to deal with the mess and atrocious concoctions thought of by and created by middle school boys, year after year, but especially not the lovely people who work at Cary Academy. It takes almost no time to clean up after one person, yourself, but it takes quite a bit of time to clean up after hundreds of people if we don’t do it ourselves. Not cleaning up after yourself is lazy, annoying, and disrespectful, and there are few exceptions to this.

Not only does this harm the dining hall staff but this harms the likelihood we will be able to make more positive changes in the future, like perhaps reinstating our old composting system to reduce the impact of our food waste. I’m sure many people noticed that after the first few days of school we went back to the Styrofoam for around a week. Many people were confused about this, including me, but it wasn’t until after I asked a faculty member that I realized the reason for this being something I previously mentioned, our students collectively threw away over 30 plates on the very first day of school. This is a funny anecdote and obviously a genuine mistake on behalf of the students who weren’t used to the plates and silverware, but it does illustrate a very clear cause and effect relationship. The more care we take of our community, the more positive changes we’ll be able to see in the future.