Nothing against the University of Massachusetts, but I'm not disappointed that I don't go there. A fond welcome-back tradition in the fall is for several hundred people to get together and construct some type of healthy, communal dish, specifically, a dish that weighs in the neighborhood of 15,000 pounds. This is all in the very noble, educational effort of making it into the Guinness book of world records.
Which would be fine, except this year the dish was a fruit salad. In my mind this sets a bad precedent: No one I know goes to college to eat in a healthy manner. What kind of welcome-back is that? Were the tradition to involve, say, a 15,000-pound ice cream sundae, with a couple of tons of toppings and maybe 500 spoons; or 7 1/2 tons of pizza with thick, chewy crust -- yes. I could certainly get behind THOSE efforts. But 7 1/2 tons of apples, plums, etc. -- no, thank you.
This is not what our great colleges and universities have been founded upon. What would the Founding Fathers (Ben and Jerry) say to this?*
The fruit salad, which did indeed earn a place in the esteemed record book, was constructed in a 15-foot swimming pool. The pool likely was donated by a retired couple, or at least the husband portion of a retired couple, who believed they no longer had any use for it, and who was probably admonished by his wife for "giving away a perfectly good salad bowl," and now what would she use to take to the Fowlers' picnic?
For next year, I urge the university to put that bowl to a better use and consider constructing a different type of food -- some excellent choices have already been mentioned in this post. I bet they'd get a LOT more than 500 people to help put it together. And also to take it apart.
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*Probably "We want Chunky Monkey!"
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