I Wish I Could Do a Psychological Study

My parents pointed out I never actually posted on this blog after the first couple of times.

(Yeah, yeah. I've been busy.)

But I just woke up from a nap, so while I'm working on getting my head screwed on right so I can function again, I thought I would take the time to make a little blog post. So don't judge me on spelling or grammar errors, okay?

So anyway, the topic of this week's post is this: If wish I could do a psychological study. I wish I could grab people as they put their dirty trays and dishes on the line and ask them, "Excuse me, but what exactly were you thinking when you did this strange thing to your food?" I am convinced that there must be personality traits in common among the people who do certain things to their food when they're done eating.

Now, don't get me wrong. I love the missionaries, and I myself was guilty of many of these things when I ate at the Cannon Center. But when you're on the other side of the spinning conveyor belt and you're scraping things off plates, you see some things that just make you go, "Huh?"

Some examples.

The Ones Who Don't Eat Their Food.

This is the most common problem I see. Half-eaten (or completely untouched) food comes through all the time, and there's nothing we can do but drop it into the foul-smelling sluice of beige running water to be whisked away into the Pulper (at least the BYU plants get those calories in the end). Sometimes, it completely makes sense—that lunch meat sandwich doesn't seem that appetizing to me either. But sometimes, they just got too much food and can't eat it all, and so it gets wasted. The saddest thing I've seen was a perfect, beautiful wrap that came through completely untouched. It was made with love. But we sent it to the Pulper without its intended recipient having taken a single bite. It was sad.

But the saddest of all is a frequent occurrence that I call—

The Tragedy of the Perfect Uneaten Chocolate Chip Cookie.

Now, I admit that I'm not a big fan of a lot of BYU's desserts, but I cannot get enough of their chocolate chip cookies. They are big and delicious and soft and the chips are somehow always just a little bit melty. When we get free desserts and work, I take one of those almost every time. So it's really sad to me that I see perfect, beautiful, completely uneaten chocolate chip cookies coming in all the time without a single bite taken out of them. I swear to you, every other tray has at least one perfect cookie that someone didn't want to eat. Sometimes, there's a little stack of two or three. All perfect, all completely uneaten. And there's nothing I can do but send them to the Pulper. Sometimes I take one and crush it slowly in my hand with my green food-covered glove before I drop it into the water because of the sheer injustice of it all.

Perfect, completely uneaten hamburgers come through all the time too, but I don't care as much about them.

Honestly, I don't understand how these people have one of those cookies in their possession and manage not to eat it, but I guess some people don't feel as strongly about their cookies as I do.

A related phenomenon—

The Ones Who Destroy Their Food.

Maybe it's because they feel bad that they haven't eaten the food they picked up, but sometimes a tray of food comes in where everything is just shredded. There's a pile of cookie bits in the corner (where they destroyed their perfect uneaten cookie instead of just leaving it there), the orange chicken and rice is crushed between two plates, and the half-filled soup bowl is filled with napkins. It's just one of those things that makes you wonder, "Why?"

Which brings me to—

The Crazies.

Okay, I'll admit it. This was me in the Cannon Center. I was that kid that all the dishroom employees hated. These are the trays that are just crazy. There are a million dishes on the tray, silverware is poking out all over the place, and there are just crumpled up napkins everywhere. The tray just looks hectic. And when you're trying to sort the silverware in the metal bin, the trash in the trash can, and the biodegradable food in the pulper, getting one of these trays guarantees a moment of frantic panic where you try to sort everything into its proper place while the tray is moving away from you on the conveyor belt.

The Healthy Ones.

I'm pretty sure these are sister missionaries, but I often see an apple core with neatly sliced off sides next to a little bowl that still has a bit of peanut butter in it. Apple slices in peanut butter! Props to them for being clever!

Now, these next ones are sort of clever...

The Fry Sauce Nuts.

For those of you who don't know, here in Utah we have this thing called fry sauce. It's basically ketchup mixed with mayonnaise, and it's wonderful. But for whatever reason, the MTC cafeteria doesn't serve straight-up fry sauce! The missionaries have to make it themselves. And instead of making it in reasonably-sized portions, a lot of missionaries fill an entire soup bowl with ketchup and mayonnaise and mix it all together. The first day I worked in the dishroom, I seriously thought it had to be some kind of pudding or soup, because there was no way that so many people had made such ridiculously large quantities of fry sauce. But lo and behold, it was fry sauce after all.

(Some people make fry sauce out of barbecue sauce instead of ketchup. I wonder how it tastes?)

The One-of-a-Kinds.

This one is my favorite. It doesn't happen very often, but every now and then, something completely unique comes through. The only one I've seen myself so far was when five or so trays all came through, each of them containing nothing but stacks and stacks of cereal bowls (my guess is fifteen apiece). I'm pretty sure they tried to clean out the Fruit Loops. And I sincerely hope they succeeded.

One of my supervisors also told me that there used to be apples that came through all the time with a bunch of forks sticking out of them. I am both sad and happy that missionaries don't do this anymore.

The Grateful. :)

Actually, I lied. This one is my favorite.

Sometimes, we get notes. Sometimes it's on a napkin, sometimes it's written with ketchup in plates, but there's nothing greater than the missionaries thanking us and telling us how much they appreciate what we do. Because yeah, it can be a hard job, and a lot of the time I feel like they don't notice or care. So it's nice to know that they do. :)

One of these days, if I feel brave enough to take my phone out of my pocket amidst the chaos of spraying water and half-eaten food, I'll try to take a picture of one.

That's all for now. Thanks for reading. I know I can be a bit snarky, and I know I complain about the missionaries, but they're just kids away from home, about to embark on a great work. And well...somebody's got to feed them. :)

Love,

Camilla