One way to put leftovers to use

Sam S. writes in with a follow-up to Comic #717, which addressed the issue of leftover food. Sam pointed me to this article about Reed College’s culture of “scroungers”, who hang out in the cafeteria and pick over others’ leftovers:

Scrounging is definitely a social activity. There are stretches of time where there’s no food—just five or six students standing around talking. In that way, scrounging provides common ground for people who may share very few similarities other than being a Reed student who doesn’t want to pay for his or her food…

I was impressed with the communal spirit of the Scrounge. There’s plenty of sharing and no hoarding. With most items (pizza crusts are a biggie), scroungers take a bite and pass it along. Etiquette dictates that scroungers use forks, not fingers. Then again, a few scroungers are partial to spoons and at least one uses really long chopsticks.

Full article here! On what is seems to be a pretty interesting blog entirely about the subject of food waste.

I first wrote “entirely about the subject of wasting food,” which is also true, but which seemed to subtly suggest that the blog advocates the wasting of food. Tips on how to throw away tomatoes more efficiently, and so on.

Word choice matters! Or so I keep telling my first wife. (Whom I am happily married to.)

6 thoughts on “One way to put leftovers to use”

  1. Students learn not to pass by the scroungers until they’re done with their food, though. 95% of them are quite polite, but that last one in 20 will hoover your fries right out of your hand, even if you were on your way to the ketchup not the trash. Also a fun vector in flu season, but colleges are a hotbed of viruses anyway.

    Neat to see my alma mater mentioned.

  2. I don’t understand. How can she be your ‘first’ wife, and yet you’re still happily married to her?

  3. I don’t understand why you felt you needed to emphasize that.

    Or maybe mine is just really paranoid about stuff like that. >.>

  4. Because he’s proud of their succeeding marriage. Or so I assume, anyway – I might be projecting.

    I keep telling my first/current husband the same thing but it’s really hard to explain to engineers. “Wait, but why do ‘food waste’ and ‘wasting food’ have different meanings when the words are the same? Dammit English should be more like C++!”

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