The word ort sometimes means a small bite of food left on a plate, and it’s a handy word for crossword puzzle solvers. Many people first encounter ort at summer camp. Linda of New York City heard it when she chaperoned her daughter’s sixth-grade class to a sleepaway camp in the Poconos. After the first meal, counselors pointed out ort buckets at the end of the dining hall and told the kids to scrape excess food from their plates. They challenged the campers to keep the buckets empty by week’s end, and it worked. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “In Summer Camps, “Ort Buckets” Are Receptacles for Leftover Food Scraps, Used to Teach Kids about Waste”
We talked not long ago about the word ort, O-R-T, meaning a small bite of food that’s left on one’s dinner plate. and Some people learn that word when they’re reading Virginia Woolf or D.H. Lawrence, and other people pick it up when they’re doing crossword puzzles because it’s such a handy word.
But apparently, a lot of people learn this word at summer camp.
We heard from Linda Hahn of New York City, who wrote to say that the first time she heard the word ort was when she chaperoned her daughter’s sixth grade class to a sleepaway camp in the Poconos.
And at the end of the camper’s first meal there, the camp counselors pointed out some buckets at the end of the dining hall.
And they called these the ort buckets, and they told the kids to scrape all the excess food off their plates into those buckets and then go back to their seats.
Those scraps of food almost filled one of the buckets.
And that’s when the counselors told them that the Oort buckets should remind them to be mindful of food waste.
And they challenged the kids to make sure that by the end of the week, those Oort buckets were empty.
And sure enough, it worked.
And Linda says, I wonder if these camp people go to some kind of group meetings to figure out new strategies to engage preteens at these camps.
Someone was like, hey, how about we focus on food waste this year?
And some word nerd at the table says, I know, we’ll call it the Oort Report.
And Grant, apparently this was a thing because we heard from another listener about daily Oort Reports at a camp in New England.
So I’m figuring that maybe a lot of English majors were working summer jobs up there in the mountains.
And summer camps have been a thing for a very long time.
So they’ve had an incredible amount of experience at putting together all these different opportunities to teach and make it more than about hikes and canoeing.
By the way, I was telling my son about our conversation about orts, and he said, oh, isn’t that a baby orc?
Yeah, when they’re just born, they’re called ortlets.
Ortlets, little ort.
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