When food is served in big pans in school, the serving spoon will sometimes fall into the food, as shown below:
What can I do to prevent this?
We could try only leaning the spoon against the long side of the pan, but that's inconvenient, and you can't expect everyone who takes food to do that. We could also get longer spoons, but I sincerely doubt that the school would lay out money for new equipment for a stupid reason like this one.
So what can I try to prevent this?
My friends found another Styrofoam solution: stick the serving spoon through a Styrofoam bowl, as shown below.
There are two solutions i can think of:
use a spoon thats longer than the longest diameter of your bowl/pan. This is abolutely fool-proof as it simply makes the spoon impossible to fit in. So: search for another, longer spoon or duct-tape/glue/solder something to enlarge your spoon like Ilmari Karonen suggested.
use a spoon with a hook at the end like this:
If you don't have one, just grab some pliers and bend the end. This probably doesn't look as dumb as solution 1 with some chopsticks duct-taped to a spoon (it isn't a 100% safe - but should be good enough).
We had this problem with a bucket of strawberry jam at a summer camp for kids — the spoons you were supposed to use to get the jam from the bucket would keep falling in, and would have to be fished out. Sometimes, you might find two or three spoons at the bottom of the bucket, under the jam. It was annoying and disgusting, not to mention unhygienic.
My stop-gap solution was to duct-tape a stick to the spoon handle to make it longer. It looked ugly but worked well enough, since the whole point of the hack was to keep that part of the spoon from falling into the jam.
Eventually, we just got a longer spoon.
