chaining objects in activeRecord, and accessing attributes from parent

Say I have Users table, and the user has many :items, if I define a method in the Item model say, def self.green so I can return all green items that belong to a user, I might use with_scope. fine, so I use like this: @user.items.green.

But what if there is a preferences table so the user wants the items to be displayed in ascending order only, how would I access that from the def self.green method in the items model?

So, I called @users.items.green, and I want to access user.preferences from the items model. Is this possible?