EDITORIAL: Playing with food

EDITORIAL%3A+Playing+with+food

By the BP Editorial Board

On any given day at school, one can see students hunched over, staring at screens, their fingers restless from typing away yet another essay, assignment or email. Pairs of eyes are tired from the constant blue light, and the near seven hours of sitting per day takes a toll on posture and energy. Students are on technology all the time, and most of their entertainment also involves electricity or the use of fossil fuels from driving around town to various hang-outs and restaurants.

But during Color War, this evaporates. Students’ eyes are not downcast on a screen, but rather level with a classmate who is screaming a chant, strategizing for a competition, or singing a team song. With homework and tests pushed off, kids and faculty were given a time to truly be present. Students were actively engaging with a task as a cohesive collective, loudly cheering one another on, dancing and singing, tossing balls or watching quirky games like Chubby Bunny or Hungry Hippos.

It is a veritable antidote to so much that is wrong with the world in 2018.

More than that, Color War so well exemplifies ways in which people, especially teenagers, can have fun in a socially and environmentally conscious way. The fashion competition used materials like plastic and paper scraps to make clothing. Most games did not use electricity. That was an impressive feat by the Student Activities Committee and faculty, showing ways teenagers can still have fun without using technology, wasting paper or creating pollution.

That made the one event which was less environmentally conscious stand out: Egg Roulette. While it was fun to watch senior Ben Mashiach get the right egg each time while less gifted students smashed raw yolks and whites into their hair, approximately 150 eggs were wasted for a game Feb. 22.  Egg Roulette is a contest to see who can guess whether an egg is raw or hard-boiled; choosing a raw one meant not only a gooey mess but also elimination from the game.

But those eggs could have been breakfast for 100 people. Moreover, one egg consumes about 50 gallons of water, according to The New York Times, given the  amount of water it takes to grow the feed for the chickens and make sure the birds themselves have enough water to drink.

An egg is a high-protein food source, each one containing more than six grams of protein. That means Egg Roulette used about 900 grams of protein and 7,500 gallons of water.

Some might say these things weren’t wasted, since the eggs were used for the purpose of fun and competition for students. But there are a lot of other ways to bring high schoolers together without using things that are scarce.

If it had been fewer eggs — say, 30 —  it may have been less inappropriate, or at least less noticeable. But`as it was, Egg Roulette stood out as wasteful, unnecessary and insensitive to the socio-economic and environmental climate of Los Angeles.  SAC can make Color War even better next year by greatly reducing the number of eggs, or by eliminating Egg Roulette altogether.