When it comes to food, don’t get in my way. I take it pretty seriously.

I’m just another college student suffering from a high metabolism.

Three times a day I find myself running to Shaw Dining Center looking to silence the angry beast in my stomach – the beast that serves as a constant reminder that Mom and Dad don’t stock my refrigerator here. I’m not looking for anything fancy, really, just something fast and relatively tasty.

Overall, my experience with the Syracuse University dining halls has been positive. No malnourishment here. But if you’ve eaten at Shaw recently, you may have seen me among the growing number of confused and frustrated students all asking the same question:

‘What’s the deal with the plastic cups and utensils?’

That’s right, many patrons of Shaw have found themselves digging in and gulping down with plastic ware.

And it’s their own fault.

The Shaw dining hall has been forced to use plastic cups and utensils because so many students have been stealing the regular dining ware, said Assistant Director of Residential Dining Mark Tewksbury.

‘It’s been hard to keep up,’ said Tewksbury. ‘We’re in the process of ordering more, but every time we do they’re stolen again.’

In the mean time, regular silverware and cups have become the minority among the flimsy plastic ones, and they are a hot commodity as a result.

To make matters worse, Shaw frequently runs out of plastic ware during prime eating hours, leading many hungry students to point their angry fingers at the dining hall staff.

But the next time you find yourself conducting a cafeteria-wide search for a fork or throwing elbows for a spoon, consider for a second the part you may have played in creating this situation. For every time you carelessly pocket silverware for some late-night ramen or walk out with take-out and a cup, hundreds of other students were doing the same thing.

Chris Ruscher, a sophomore aerospace engineering major who dines frequently at Shaw, thinks that the workers who swipe cards should make sure that people aren’t stealing.

‘I feel that we’re paying enough to eat here – they should have decent silverware,’ Rusher said.

The dining hall staff is doing their best to keep utensils in our grabby hands, but distributing disposable forks has been an uphill, not to mention wasteful, battle.

If we want Shaw to recover before the end of the semester, we need to first be understanding and patient, and simply make the best of it. Wastefulness aside, it is far from a crisis to have to use disposables – although it’s no picnic trying to spear fresh carrots or cut meat.

Secondly, and most importantly, we need to stop stealing. While not everybody has been stealing from Shaw, it is time for those who have been to stop.

This applies to everyone, and every dining hall. Haven’s cafeteria recently put up a sign asking students to return stolen cups and silverware. Many students make the mistake of thinking that everything at the dining halls is unlimited, when clearly, this is not the case.

We have all been using our stolen spoons to slowly dig our own graves. We just happen to be faster diggers at Shaw.

Meghan Overdeep is a featured columnist whose columns normally appear Fridays in The Daily Orange. E-mail her at meoverde@syr.edu.

Published on April 4, 2007 at 12:00 pm