Freshman year I developed a useful survival tactic at Mocon. I had a bowl of cereal with every meal. Cereal was consistently good food, I got calcium from the milk, and it was a cool personal quirk. It made for a good start of every meal regardless of the quality of Mocon’s food selection that day. Also, I missed eating breakfast food.
In the beginning there were yellow bowls that were fairly deep and had a small curved lip. These were great. They were heavy plastic, good for not only cereal, but soup and ice cream as well. I would regularly reuse mine for more cereal and/or ice cream to cut down on the dishes I used. Being deep, it was hard to spill much of anything while weaving through people to get to food or seat.
At some point last year, new bowls were introduced. These were white, possibly ceramic (I don’t remember). I tried to stick with the original yellows, but sometimes I couldn’t find any and I was forced to use a white bowl. These bowls were exceedingly shallow and had a wide lip.
They couldn’t hold nearly the load that the yellow bowls could. If you tried, the shallowness of the bowl allowed for easy spills even with its wide lip, which was flat. The lip also made a) drinking anything out of the bowls extremely hard/tricky/annoying b) the bowl take up much more room on your tray than was necessary. As you should know, in an all-you-can-eat dining area such as Mocon, space on tray is a precious commodity.
The new white bowls were inferior in almost every way. I would plan my route through Mocon in order to go by the soups to get a yellow bowl to use for cereal.
Every now and then disposable bowls would show up. These looked decent (better than the white ones easily). However, due to the sheer amount of people that go through Mocon every day, this generated a large amount of trash. Also, they were not as big as the original yellow bowls, nor as sturdy. I would continue to hunt out the yellow bowls wherever they might be.
This year, as a sophomore living in the Butts, I have not ventured to Mocon nearly as frequently. On my last visit it seemed the dishwasher had broken because everything was disposable (awful amount of garbage).
However, on my trip before that a wondrous sight I beheld. New yellow bowls! Not the same as the old ones, but infinitely superior to the white ones. I was intrigued. I took one, for research purposes, and now I present you with my preliminary findings.
The original yellow bowls are about 5.5 cm tall, 14 cm across on the top, and 6.5 cm on the bottom.
The new yellow bowls are about 4.75 cm tall, 13.5 cm top diameter, and
7.5 cm bottom diameter.
The original bowls curve down from the lip then slowly back to horizontal for the base. The new bowls have no lip, descending at approx. 75 degrees right from the rim, slowly curving to horizontal.
The obvious information, which I of course found only after measuring a bowl, is molded into the bottom of the bowl. The old yellow bowl is a 10 oz bowl, called “DURUS” or some such. The new bowl is a 14 oz bowl called “Dallas Ware.” (DURUS wins on name-coolness.) There are some more numbers and stuff, and they are both made in China and from the same company of course. I think the numbers might have something to indicate that the old bowl is thicker than the new one, which it is, which is why I think that.
In conclusion, I will always love the original yellow bowls, but the new yellow bowls are a worthy addition to Mocon’s arsenal. I also hope there are more Cocoa Krispies.
Leave a Reply