By Chloe Baker, Senior Opinions Editor
On a typical Wednesday night you can find me working as a cashier at Milner’s Mart, a canteen-like store in the Brookdale back lounge. The job is fun. I talk with people as I check them out, I have time to work on my homework when there aren’t too many customers or shelves to stock, and I even get the odd free item here and there. Every now and then things in the store become hectic. The system crashes and a line of customers starts to form, or I have to enforce the rule that no one likes: only six pieces per item.
One Wednesday night in particular, I had to enforce the rule so many times that when the store was empty for a moment I went to the security desk and asked them if they had any paper and a pen. They gave me an old piece of scrap paper, a half-dried-out Sharpie and a guest pass sticker to act as the tape. With these items I pathetically wrote out the phrase “Limit 6 pieces per item. Save some for your friends who also want.” I stuck it on the front of the already opened door, hoping that my next batch of customers would pay any amount of attention to it so that I wouldn’t have to say it again.
Turns out the sign didn’t do too much. The small guest pass on the large door didn’t catch people’s attention in the way I had envisioned, or maybe people just choose not to read it. I still found myself uttering the phrase and encountering customers who pushed back or found creative ways around it. One common workaround: a girl would have me ring up six packs of sour sticks, pay and return a few minutes later for six more – a second transaction, technically, but I knew what was happening. Others would simply spend the $100 maximum the system allows for, walk out, and come back in line to do it all over again. I’ve rung up orders of $100 on sour sticks of every color and flavor, watched the total climb sky high, and found myself wondering: why does one need that much candy?
Though I’ll admit, I don’t always know the full story. There’s one regular customer who comes in and buys large quantities every time, and I used to think nothing of it until she mentioned, almost in passing, that she works at a hospital with sick children and buys it for them. I think about her sometimes when I’m quick to assume. She’s the exception that keeps me honest, and a good reminder that I don’t always know the full story.
However, I have a strong feeling that 99% of customers (both at Milner’s and the cafeteria) are not buying snacks for sick children.
We are, for the most part, buying it for ourselves. And there is nothing inherently bad about that. But there is something worth pausing on: the ease of it all. The normalcy of this. The fact that spending $200 of cafeteria funds on candy in a single night doesn’t register as unusual. That the instinct isn’t to first wonder if anyone else might want some, but to get as much as possible before it runs out. Customers often complain to me that Milner’s is understocked, but how can they expect it to be stocked when they are the ones buying it out? We have been so conditioned to have what we want, when we want it, that the habit of accumulation doesn’t even feel like a choice anymore. It just feels normal.
But it isn’t normal. Not everywhere. Not for everyone. There are people in this city – not far from our campuses – who are food insecure. More than 1.4 million New Yorkers struggle to access enough food, and one in four children in the city does not know where their next meal will come from. New York City’s poverty rate sits at nearly twice the national average. But this isn’t just a New York problem. According to a 2024 report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, 733 million people worldwide face hunger. This is a number that has barely moved in three years, stubbornly unchanged since the COVID-19 pandemic drove it upward.
The concept in halacha of Bal Tashchit (do not destroy) prohibits us from destroying or wasting useful items. This originates from Deuteronomy 20:19, and speaks about fruit trees during wartime. According to our sages, this concept extends to anything useful, particularly food. Writing in the Times of Israel, Rabbi Chaim Ingram encourages “everyone with a social conscience to speak out against the scandal of bal tashchit in respect of first-world food wastage which strikes at the heart of Torah sensibilities.” He writes about leftover Shabbat delicacies – cholent, challah, chicken and meat – and emphasizes that everyone has a personal duty to educate themselves and their families about the fact that food need not be discarded right after Shabbat simply because it isn’t as fresh as it once was.
How ironic, then, that in a Jewish institution, we ourselves are guilty of this. Each week, at the end of Shabbat, all of the leftover food gets completely thrown out and discarded. Sent to the trash like it’s no big deal. Once a week on garbage pick-up day, the corner of 35th and Lexington is lined with garbage bags, sometimes bursting at the seams with leftover food. I walk past these bags with such sadness in my heart, knowing that so many around us – in the city and the world – don’t have food to eat. I’ve even seen homeless people searching through these very bags.
Now, this isn’t me faulting the Shabbat waitstaff or those who work in the cafeteria. I have immense respect for both groups, and I know that they are doing their jobs and are answering to higher-ups. When I’ve asked waitresses why the food can’t be donated, the answer I have been given has always been the same: there are laws prohibiting it. And there are, to an extent. Food must be “apparently wholesome” and donations must go through nonprofit organizations. But the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act explicitly protects institutions of higher education from civil and criminal liability when donating food in good faith. In this frame, Yeshiva University is covered. The protection is there. So the question of why the food still ends up in garbage bags on the corner of 35th and Lexington is one I don’t have a clear-cut answer to – and perhaps one worth asking.
I am not writing this and asking us to solve world hunger, nor am I suggesting that if we buy fewer sour sticks a poor kid in the Bronx will go to bed full. I’m aware that the math doesn’t work that way. What I am asking is for something smaller, and perhaps even harder: internal consciousness. The ability to pause, even briefly, and recognize that the abundance we move through daily is not the default human experience. We are privileged beyond belief. The ease with which we spend $200 on candy (whether it be through cafeteria funds or “real money”), or throw away trays of untouched food, or do a second transaction to get around a rule – none of it is normal.
Maybe one day I’ll come into my Wednesday night shift and the sign won’t be necessary. Not because it finally catches people’s attention, but because somewhere between walking in and reaching for that tenth pack of sour sticks, or an entire tray of gum, someone pauses and thinks: does anyone else want some of these? Do I really need this many? Not out of guilt. Not because an article told them to, but because they’ve internalized, even slightly, that there is no good reason to have fifteen packs of sour sticks (maybe unless you’re giving them to sick children) when six will do. Maybe one day people will be conscious of the nearly empty shelf behind them, and feel that Milner’s being stocked tomorrow matters. They will acknowledge that someone else might want some too.
It’s a small thing. But so was a guest pass sticker and a half-dried Sharpie, and I tried that too.
Photo Credit: Chloe Baker