It’s meal time at Haverford; you’ve journeyed through the Dining Center, endured long lines to swipe in your One Card and piled globs of splendid grease and starch onto your plate to fuel your tireless days and nights as a college student. All you need now to ease the transport of such nourishment is a big plastic cup of sugary liquids.
However, while pressing the magical button of infinite fluids, you notice a change of scenery. Next to the fountain of juice are numerous cups. They appear to be DC cups…but of an excessively shrunken stature.
What lies before you are the newest and littlest additions to the DC. These four-ounce cups (about a fourth of the size of the regular DC cups), represent “the correct portion size” of juice, according to Anthony Condo, Associate Director of Dining Services.
“In our menu software,” said Condo, “the nutritional analysis for juice is based off of a 4oz portion…a fairly standard juice portion in the foodservice industry.”
The menu software is the nutritional information database located in the Dining Services section of the Haverford College website. Many students don’t realize that they eat too much of certain foods, especially the large amounts of sugars which are found in fruit juice.
In lieu of any major announcement made by Dining Services, Haverford students have thought of other reasons to explain the sudden appearance of the mysterious cups.
“Last year a lot [of cups] went missing,” said Emma Lumey ’16, “Maybe they needed some new ones but ordered the wrong size.”
Many cups were indeed borrowed and never returned by Haverford students last semester. However, if the ‘borrowing’ of cups is the problem, then these portion-control promoters might not be the best solution.
“I’d bet big bucks that people have been stealing them to use as shot glasses,” said Marina Relman ’15.
Many students share Relman’s opinion, and Ryan Gilliom ’15 took a step further by saying, “I’m shocked they haven’t ALL been stolen yet.”
There have been rumors of the cups being used for double shots. However, if the standard shot is 1.5 ounces than these 4.0 ounce cups would provide a little more punch than what novice drinkers may have bargained for.
Other students have invented less inebriant uses for the cup. On some crisp autumn mornings, Joel Christian ‘15 wards off the lingering disease known as Haverplague by filling a cup with water to mix with the vitamin C-rich elixir, Emergen-C. Meanwhile, Lumey uses the cups to water down her soup when it’s too salty. Despite the cups’ non-juice-related versatility, many students perceive them as threats of an encroaching DC authority.
“I don’t like how the DC is babying us by monitoring our portions,” states Courtney Lau ‘17.
These are not uncommon feelings towards the DC, which recently moved the salt and pepper shakers from each table and took away trays several years ago to be more “eco-friendly” or some such guise. The cup development would indeed support claims that Haverford is moving towards an autocratic state which imposes rations in an attempt to control students.
While that may seem far-fetched, the cups’ quiet and unpublicized entrance will continue to stir rumors for generations to come.
I believe that this change in the DC’s policy is a true blessing. As the inventor of the “DC cup stacking challenge”, this change brings the game to a whole new level. For those unfamiliar with the challenge, you collect a number of cups to be returned to the dish return on the west side of the DC. Arranging the cups as you like on the counter, you then have to stack the cups in a pyramid before they reach the end of the line. With these smaller cups, one can now stack many more cups in the challenge.