**Paper Plates: Humanity's Triumph of Convenience Over Common Sense**
# PAPER PLATES
**Paper Plates** are a form of disposable eating receptacle popular on
 less sophisticated worlds, particularly Earth, where the inhabitants
 have somehow managed to develop interstellar radio transmission but
 still haven't figured out how to wash dishes without complaining about
 it.
The paper plate represents one of humanity's most telling
 contradictions: a species capable of splitting the atom and composing
 symphonies, yet so fundamentally lazy that they invented a plate
 designed to be thrown away after a single use, typically containing
 nothing more challenging than a hamburger or a slice of birthday cake.
## History
Paper plates were invented in the early 20th century by people who
 looked at perfectly functional ceramic plates and thought, "Yes,
 but what if we made these *worse* and also terrible for the
 environment?"
## Construction
A paper plate is made by taking wood pulp - which could have been a
 tree, a book, or possibly even a love letter - and pressing it into a
 vaguely circular shape with a slight depression in the middle. The
 depression serves two purposes:
1. To hold food
2. To give the plate structural integrity, which it will immediately
 lose the moment anything remotely moist is placed upon it
## Usage
The typical lifecycle of a paper plate is approximately 7 minutes,
 during which time it will:
- Be removed from a plastic wrapper (itself wasteful)
- Hold food inadequately
- Develop a soggy spot that threatens to deposit said food onto the
 user's lap
- Be thrown away, where it will outlive several generations of the
 family that used it
## Cultural Significance
On Earth, paper plates are considered essential for:
- Picnics
- Children's parties
- Camping trips
- Any situation where doing the washing up seems harder than
 contributing to landfill
The Betelgeusians find this concept utterly baffling, as they simply
 eat directly off tables and then lick them clean. The tables, that is.
 Not the plates. They don't have plates. That's rather the point.
## See Also
- Plastic Cutlery (An Even Worse Idea)
- The Washing Up (Why Humans Fear It)
- Disposable Culture (Earth's Specialty)
- Towels (The Only Thing Worth Keeping)