Close your eyes. Then open them to keep reading. We want you to imagine a world without cutlery. A world without a means to obtain one’s nutrients without disgracefully sullying one’s fingers. A world without forks, knives, butter knives, fish knives, small forks for salads, smaller forks for aperitifs or even spoons. Picture this for a moment. Picture sitting down this afternoon with your hot cup of bouillabaisse, compliments of your beloved chef. Now picture being unable to raise your seafood broth to your lips, being incapable of savoring the medley of spices and sea-salt that sous chef Ishinabe has simmered to gustatory perfection.

This is the stark reality for the students ofStaplesHigh School, who lunch every day in the school cafeteria (strict security prevents Ishinabe from attending with them).

True, they are not completely without spoons–but the ones with which they are provided with lie so below the standards of utility that the students would be better off without them.

We find this situation morally reprehensible—should not a school that provides such a variety of (admittedly bourgeois) semi-liquid fare also provide its attendees with the tools to enjoy them? From clam chowder to tomato puree, yogurt parfait to pudding au chocolat, students are welcome only to look at or smell many offerings, their gustatory senses prohibited from even a taste of satisfaction by the offensively scanty cutlery offerings.

Yes, there regular spoons, and, almost as an affront to students’ intelligence, are specially designated “soup spoons.”

These shallow instruments have a small diameter.

And they’re made of flimsy plastic.

They are also encased in a wrapping that, in addition to being a waste of plastic in a scarcely resourced world and a major source of unsightly trash in the cafeteria, is hermetically sealed.

The result? Frustration, and broken spoons, for all the denizens of Staples—even Principal John Dodig, who acknowledged that removing the spoons from the wrappers can be “very difficult.”

Indeed.

If one attempts to open the spoon with the head first, there’s a good chance that the spoon will break, or that the plastic wrapper will adhere to the spoon’s plastic and become irrevocably lodged inside one’s meal. By and large, however, the greatest hazard to an innocent spoon user is that the utensil will catch in the plastic and bend beyond usefulness, becoming nothing more than a warped testament to its own inefficacy.

Let us turn a sympathetic ear to the cries of our fellow men. “I find these spoons to be too small,” bemoans Kyle Mikesh ’12. “I have trouble getting a mouthful of food.” He, like many, enjoys a cup of steaming chicken noodle soup in the air-conditioned Staples climate, which can be veritably arctic. But this broth comes laden with hearty extras—al dente noodles, pieces of roasted chicken, even carrots—that evade all efforts of capture.

It might be worth examining the motives of the school—is this some draconian method of increasing concentration by pushing us to the very limits of our existence? Is a regiment of starvation the solution to raising SAT scores? We think not.

According to Augie Gradoux-Matt ’12, “both choices of spoons are too small.” Rather, Augie, is it the school district’s paltry respect for its students that is undersized?

As Malcolm X once said, “A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything” and now is the time to take a stand. As the number one high school in Connecticut, the deplorable conditions of our cutlery should send a shiver of chagrin down the spine of those proud of that title. A silent monstrosity is being committed in cold blood against those who work and learn inStaplesHigh Schoolas colder still grow the uneaten urns of soup.

And on that note, the forks aren’t much good either…