Letters

Donald A. O’Neil / Westford

Baby’s Night Out I found Miss Conduct’s response to the couple wanting advice about taking their child to an upscale restaurant totally off the mark (“Table for Three,” March 28). If, as it seems, the couple is pretty well off, why wouldn’t they leave a child older than 3 with a sitter rather than inflicting her/him on other diners? I had a terrible experience at a restaurant in Marblehead, where parents allowed their two children to run wild. A friend solved this problem when she took a friend out for a birthday dinner at a fancy restaurant. Two children misbehaved during the entire meal, and the parents did nothing. My friend put her check down on the parents’ table. “You ruined our meal. Now you can pay for it,” she said. If parents can’t afford a baby sitter, they should stay home and order pizza.

Mary Elizabeth Devine / Marblehead

As for the question “when and where” will it be appropriate to bring the baby to dinner, D.G. and his wife need only ask the question my mother taught me to ask: What if everybody did XYZ? When this couple were indulging themselves in their hobby of dining out at great restaurants these past years, how would they have reacted if every other table comprised a loving mom, dad, and infant? I expect they might not have returned to that restaurant.

Bruce Horwitz / Newton

My husband and I began taking our son out to dinner as soon as I was able to start venturing from home. Unless we have a sitter, we all go out every Saturday night. The key to taking children out to dinner is knowing your child’s schedule and anticipating what you will need to have a nice meal. Get to the restaurant early – well before you usually eat dinner, so if there is a line, your child won’t get crabby waiting for the food. Bring a snack, especially if your child is young, and some entertainment, such as drawing pads. We have only had to leave a restaurant once before finishing our meal – we arrived too late, and our son had an ear infection, to boot. Not bad for 9½ years and counting!

Christine Gordon / Chelmsford

Waste Not I was a little taken aback by Aubin Tyler’s assertion in “The Case for Mandatory Composting” (Perspective, March 21) that “scattered households with compost heaps won’t make a dent in this problem.” We live on just about an eighth of an acre and have been composting for more than a year. We do it mostly to enrich our garden, but we’ve also noticed that our quantity of trash has dramatically decreased. I talk about my composting to anyone who will listen, and most are fascinated to learn that people in populated suburbs can compost effectively. We “scattered households” might not make a big (if any) impact globally, but we do make a dent by setting an example and educating others.

Becky Haugh / Weymouth

Following a very successful pilot program in 2009 that involved 74 households, the towns of Hamilton and Wenham are backing a composting initiative that went into effect on March 31 – the first municipal curbside composted-waste recycling program in New England. It’s a grass-roots endeavor with many volunteers. For more information, call the Trash Hot Line, 978-468-5515.

Buffy Colt / Wenham

Composting can be a good method for disposing of source-separated yard wastes and food wastes. However, composting technology is not practical for all organic wastes, especially after they are mixed with the bulk of municipal wastes, as is the usual case. In addition to San Francisco, Canada often is advanced as an example of successful composting, but our studies reveal that only the city of Toronto can claim a successful food-waste composting system. In reality, there is no state in the United States, or country in the world, that composts a significant fraction of its food wastes. The story is much better with source-separated “yard” or “green” wastes, where about 50 percent are composted in the United States. The only viable alternative to landfills for disposing of post-recycling waste is combustion with recovery of electricity. In this regard, Massachusetts joins with the environmental policy of the European Union as being far ahead of several other states, including California, in using safe, state-of-the-art environmental practices, among them its waste-to-energy plants, recycling and composting facilities, and landfills.

Nickolas J. Themelis, Director of the Earth Engineering Center,

Columbia University, New York

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