Over a decade ago, during my final year there, my university removed their trays. I simply took one from the servery prior to the date of their removal, and continued to bring it with me and happily use it for myself. I regularly had people ask where I had found the tray, presumably hoping that they had been brought back.
I find it amusing that the article specifically mentions salad towards the end, as that was my reason for deciding to pilfer a tray. My regular meal was a small entree, a large plate of salad, and a drink. That is three items, but I only have two hands.
I bought some cafe trays off Amazon a few years back for organizational purposes. I've never ate from them though they are clearly fit for it - but they're just a great all-purpose space divider and stack well when unused. I even use them in the fridge to create some slide-out space without a drawer. Combine with some smaller tray divider systems and shelving and you can clear up a lot of small odds-and-ends piles without banishing them to a box.
The idea of having to transport a tray -- a large, bulky awkward item -- just so I can utilize it at the cafeteria seems more inconvenient than foregoing the benefits of having it while in the cafe.
There was one time when they were explicitly allowed to be used as paddles during the Cardboard Boat Race (otherwise the boat, including its means of propulsion, had to be made entirely from cardboard, PVA glue and duct tape).
Then they changed the rules to allow any safe means of propulsion ("safe" essentially meaning "not an outboard motor, you idiots, there will be people in the water"). Canoe paddles were the most common, but I also saw pedal power, paddle wheels powered by electric drills geared down through a bicycle transmission, and one boat towed by a scuba diver at the bottom of the river...
Every person is just a mouse in a maze these days - we're all subject to a constant barrage of subliminal A/B testing to "nudge" us in whatever direction some technocrat has decided this week. I suppose being left to our own devices is out of the question?
You’re right about how ubiquitous it is and it’s awful. It’s like collectively we’ve decided that the best way to get people to do what we want isn’t to try to convince them of our idea’s benefits, but to make their lives unpleasant and/or inconvenient if they don’t adopt it. It’s infuriating.
They were providing you the trays outright before-- was that being left to your own devices? Seems the more natural and primitive state is letting you get your food and if you see fit to obtain a tray to eat it with well no one's stopping you.
These behavioral nudges are desirable for decision makers because they can push people into behaving a certain way without needing to explicitly write down or put up posters about them. In other words, doing things this way has a much lower change of the public pushing back.
I wonder sometimes if people having smaller families, delaying children, and spending more time away from home is then projecting some people's nannying instincts and hand-wringing about behavior that used to be focused inside a family upon everyone else.
> A 2015 study found that trayless dining decreased the percentage of diners who took salad by 65.2 percent but did not decrease the percentage who took dessert.
Seems like an important finding, and one that could cut against removing trays. Don't we want people to be eating salads?
That that is buried at the end as a throwaway joke, when it's the only relevant (and quite concerning) statistic in the article, is revealing. No surveys, no student comments, no retention estimates - plenty of statistics about how much the universities like it, though. The article is an exercise in one-sided cost-benefit, which considers only the reduction in costs to the university as a benefit, while denying the costs and lost benefits to others.
The article spends most of its time talking about how great it is to reduce food waste or cut the budget, as if that was the only thing that was important. But of course, you could reduce food waste by 100% if you simply shut down the college, or starve the students to death. Can't have any food waste if you don't have any students.
The purpose of food is the welfare and happiness of the students, who are paying extremely large amounts of money for the convivial experience of college life; instead, they are being nickel-and-dimed, made to run back and forth between their table and the food if they want some more. (All that, and they are often forced into overpriced meal plans where they couldn't eat every meal they pay for, because you'd need a team of logisticians to figure out how to hit the timings between class and time slots.) This improves the balance sheet of the food bureaucrats, because it forces the losses onto the students, who do not appear on the balance sheet. (See also: McNamara and the Vietnam War, on the fallacy of valuing only what can be easily measured.)
It also includes some pretty choice bureaucratese, like the claim no student has ever complained about the lack. Which is really something. First, as other comments note, students are taught to be powerless and may cope by simply bringing their own tray. Second, per the 1% rule, you will only ever hear the tiniest fraction of complaints. I know when my college switched, students did complain, but whether they complained to the bureaucrat in charge, I don't know. Third, how would students know? You don't use trays at home, which is where students live before dorms, and all of the students who remember how much better trays were will be gone in a few years, and any stray complaints that make it through can be greenwashed away. Finally, I've found that when people make these hyperbolic rhetorical claims of never hearing any complaints or seeing zero problems, this is typically a bald-faced lie: what they actually mean is, "I have, but I choose to strategically forget, and no one is powerful enough to force me to officially acknowledge the problem". (I sometimes think the most valuable thing you can learn from reading Harry Potter is Hermione's translation of Dolores Umbridge's speech.)
Since the carbon footprint of meat is so high, some university cafeterias in Germany basically completely banned meat from their menus, which - I think - is a pretty smart step towards reducing emissions and becoming more sustainable.
Do you assume, just because people don't get meat in one cantina they are no longer allowed to eat meat by themselves?
No one is a vegetarian just because they are not getting it brought to them on a silver plate.
You do know that eating that much meat is a relatively new development right? A meat day should be the sane default not a vegetarian day in a cafeteria...
In the US uni system usually there are prepaid mandatory meal plans. The student can not afford food outside of their prepaid meal plan at the cafeteria.
True! But not taking salad means not eating salad. Also, people typically eat salad first, at least where I live (US). So it's not likely they're already full by the time they get to it.
> At American University, which eliminated cafeteria trays, one study indicated the move would save 13 tons of food every semester
The more interesting but unasked Q to me is, How much food would be saved if they just did away with the dining halls? People that pay for each component of each meal probably waste considerably less food than the pre-paid assembly line of junk.
* It is more efficient -- no need to bill for every item, so just tap your RFID card on the way in.
* It is usually billed in the general proximity of tuition, so if parents are paying they can be sure the money is spent on food rather than beer.
* Students are in a weird spot, lots of stuff is being thrown at them (studying of course, and might be away from home for the first time). It is nice to take the financial concern out of the nutritional balance calculus.
* If the admin is motivated, they can simplify the waste stream (it is centrally managed and lends itself to buffet style, so they can make sure everything that the students get is biodegradable -- the waste should just be compost).
My Cambridge (UK) college billed per item, and I not sure you lose all of those advantages.
> It is more efficient -- no need to bill for every item, so just tap your RFID card on the way in.
The items were just quickly added up by a person at the end of the line, then you'd scan your student barcode/tap an RFID card and be billed for that amount. This was never the bottleneck in getting served.
> It is usually billed in the general proximity of tuition, so if parents are paying they can be sure the money is spent on food rather than beer.
You were billed in arrears at the start of the next term, so it was clear the money was going to the college (you could also use your card in the college bar, but IIRC this was itemised differently so parents could check if they want).
> It is nice to take the financial concern out of the nutritional balance calculus.
Certainly nice, but removing trays may skew the balance in other ways (FTA "trayless dining decreased the percentage of diners who took salad by 65.2 percent but did not decrease the percentage who took dessert").
> they can make sure everything that the students get is biodegradable / Plus is is a nice community space.
Most people ate in halls anyway (the accommodation only had very rudimentary cooking facilities), so the first is still doable and we gathered as a group to dine most evenings. You'd also meet other people who happened to go at the same time.
My freshman year I ate in the dining hall. I primarily ate Lucky Charms for every meal. I’m not sure how much nutritional balance calculus I was doing.
This "People that pay for each component of each meal probably waste considerably less..." is one of those arguments that depend on Economic Man being real. It is in fact rational to pay flat rates even when some subset of the population gets outsize benefits and others pay more than they otherwise would. That's why your ISP bill is flat rate (albeit with a cap). That means that within a wide range of use cases, your bill is predictable.
Predictability has value. Economists may argue that more variables let you optimize systems. But real humans have a limited ability to pay attention to their economics.
Getting rid of trays looks like an obvious winner. But paying for every item in a dining hall would be a sucky UX and lead to perverse outcomes because customers will find the product hard to use.
I find the point about predictability interesting.
Personally, sometimes (not always) I have been in a buffet and the quality is very low because some people eat as much as they can. In that context I would gladly have paid per item. Point one, quality may change when charged per item.
> But paying for every item in a dining hall would be a sucky UX and lead to perverse outcomes because customers will find the product hard to use.
I basically only disagree with you on this one. This is exactly how restaurants work, and customers do not find it hard to use. They still often have a menu to combine a subset of all the items available under a common pricing.
IMO it is cultural. I believe it is a combination of two factors:
First, do we think of the students as intelligent creatures, with discerning capabilities, or as cattle to be fed?
And second, do we value the quality of food, or it is just a problem to be solved at the minimum cost?
Paying per component or buffet can both work. I do not think one is more efficient/rational. Quality, freshness of product, amount of food wasted, variance in price, health implications, can change a lot between both approaches.
Apparently they tried that at CalTech in the 70's, and then re-instated the dining halls at the behest of parents after a significant percentage of the undergraduates showed symptoms of malnutrition.
I can certainly believe it. One of my friends at Caltech spent a term eating nothing but instant ramen and green tea. By the end of the term he became very sick and his gums started bleeding. Once someone pointed out that it looked like he had scurvy he drank a quart of orange juice and his symptoms went away.
I was curious, so I looked it up and there are about 13k students at American university. That suggests that the food waste savings would be about 2 pounds per student per semester, so like a spoonful per day or so. Doesn’t seem very impactful.
I don't quite get the logistics. The photo in the article is of the kind of trays that substitute for a plate, with compartments for different foods. I haven't been to that kind of cafeteria in many years.
But the buffet restaurants I do visit serve on plates, and provide trays to carry the plates. If you have a main dish, a salad, a dessert and a drink, but no tray, that's multiple trips to the table.
So trays don't feel very optional to me. What am I missing? Are people not minding multiple trips, doing fancy balancing acts on the way back to the table, or combining everything on a plate?
The claim is that people will be too lazy to make multiple trips for food, thus saving on "food waste"; this actually saves the university money on the food the students have already paid for with their meal plan. In reality, college students are hungry and will just make the necessary number of additional trips to get the food they want, while thinking (correctly) that the university administration are a bunch of tools.
The study that "proved" the savings thesis was at one university in the US for one week in 2009 sampling 30 diners per meal per day and found an average "savings" of 35 grams. An apple weighs around 100g; so eliminating trays saves a third of an apple per diner per meal according to this study. This seems like thin soup to base a policy on that inconveniences tens of thousands of students every day.
I went to a college with a well stocked "Many choices" model of dining hall, and it didn't use trays.
It was not an issue. You just got up and went to get more food if you were still hungry, in the same manner as you would go refill your glass if you were still thirsty. Getting up and walking fifty feet to go get food is not some herculean task.
Incidentally, the customary way of eating an apple wastes about a third of the apple. Instead of eating it from the side and throwing away the core, try plucking out the stem then eating the apple from the top. There's no perceptible core if you eat an apple from the top, just a few seeds.
I like to eat it from the bottom and use the stem as a handle. Depending on the variety of apple the tough stuff around the seeds may be more or less palatable, but there is certainly flesh between the seeds that often gets wasted.
Maybe that's why we don't see bags of apple seeds being sold next to sunflower seeds in grocery stores, but there's no way you'd be able to eat enough whole apples to poison yourself with those seeds. The supposed toxicity of apple seeds is greatly exaggerated. Yes, they contain a compound that is metabolized into cyanide. But so do many seeds and nuts, and our bodies are evolved to deal with it. The half-life of cyanide in your body is about an hour, it gets metabolized and doesn't accumulate in you. You'll never feel the effects of the cyanide even if you eat several apples a day.
In the eyes of the decision makers, the loss of functionality you describe is a feature, not a bug. Making it harder for you to procure food "reduces waste".
It is the same line of thinking in which companies slash their call center staffing, add a recorded message about "unprecedented call volume", and then happily exclaim that since users have to sit on hold for hours, phone contacts have significantly decreased, thus "reducing waste" from an operational perspective.
There are multiple photos of trays in the article, and it's pretty clear form context that they're referring to the trays that hold plates, not substitute for them.
I'd imagine the top photo was chosen for it's color and whimsy.
> A 2015 study found that trayless dining decreased the percentage of diners who took salad by 65.2 percent but did not decrease the percentage who took dessert. Can students have their cake and eat it, too? Yes — just not off a tray.
I would tend to assume that food waste should mostly be compost, as long as plastic wrappers and other non-biodegradable waste is kept out. Which, depending on how it is implemented, moving away from trays would seem to be a step backwards, to me.
> How big of a deal is food waste environmentally?
Hardly at all.
The real reason to remove trays from all-you-can-eat dining is to save money on ingredients - force customers to choose between a drink and a dessert and you'll have to pay for far fewer desserts.
The biggest component of food waste environmental impact is not the food itself, but all the components of making the food.
First, you clear the land for farming, which includes machinery use, so transportation of petroleum using petroleum, then burning it, repairs and manufacturing of machines, etc.
Then you do the farming, which involves a bunch of petroleum burning for machinery and transporting the things needed to grow it.
Then you harvest it, again, same thing, plus storage.
Then you transport it to where the grown things are processed.
You do the processing, package it up, and transport it to the dining hall.
Right, but the carbon in food comes from plants (or, comes from things that got their carbon from plants) which got their carbon out of the atmosphere from recent photosynthesis. It's carbon that's already part of the carbon cycle, which is a dynamic but overall steady-state system.
Emitting carbon which recently came from the atmosphere back into the atmosphere is not a problem. Emitting carbon which has been safely stored in rocks for tens (or hundreds) of millions of years is the problem. That's the carbon that's caused the increase in CO2 from 280ppm 200 years ago, to 420ppm today, which is the driver of climate change. Nothing to do with food waste.
It is mostly the energy used to produce and transport the food and other required inputs (like fertilizer), not so much the gases it belches out in compost.
Also as food is quite a lot of water I would imagine cooking or even heating it is not very low point of consumption either. And I don't think we are very efficient with waste heat of the process.
Food waste is deeply necessary. If the amount of annual food waste is less than the unavoidable year to year variance in food production, you get occasional famines.
As someone who grew up in a pretty strict “no food waste” household I can say that juggling around four plates just because the college thought I was going to dump most of it in the trash sucked. Hearing someone dropping a plate was at least a weekly occurrence in the dining halls.
I read the article and all of the comments on this page and I am still left baffled. I went to a commuter college for a little bit but I couldn’t afford to buy food. I don’t understand this experience very well other than visiting hospitals and eating in the cafeteria while I waited for someone.
* Do they still use those heavy institutional plates for the food, or do they now use recyclable paper or what?
* It seems like trays would reduce the number of dishes broken, assuming breakable dishes are used these days.
* Is the food normally packaged when you buy it or is there still a concept of having them slop variable amounts oatmeal or fruit salad or or casserole or whatever into your bowl?
* I imagine if I were a student I would actually like trays, because they seem like a much more efficient way to get the meal started. Also kind of comforting maybe. It appears that the universe of these just stopped using them because it is probably much more convenient and cheaper. Or am I hopelessly out of date and unaware that there is some kind of severe disadvantage imposed by trays?
> A 2015 study found that trayless dining decreased the percentage of diners who took salad by 65.2 percent but did not decrease the percentage who took dessert. Can students have their cake and eat it, too? Yes — just not off a tray.
So food waste may be down, but I bet food waist is up!
I think going back to the plate-trays as seen in the first picture might be more useful, defined sizes for various things, and no plates or bowls at all.
Then you're just washing one item instead of multiple.
Exactly. A few paragraphs in I started skimming for some mention of what they replaced trays with. There was nothing. When I went to university there were plastic plates, which amounts to the same thing as trays in regard to the cleaning that the article talks about. Are they using paper dishes? Having students supply their own?
No no. The idea is that before, you had plates and bowls sitting on top of a tray. All had to be washed and disinfected. Now you don't have the tray, the students carry their plates in their hand directly. No tray to wash.
This is a significant accessibility and inclusive design issue - carrying multiple untippable objects is a little tricky for the median person, but is near-impossible for someone who is using a guide dog or cane, someone who is carrying a child in one arm or someone with a shoulder spica cast.
The people who suffer from these policies will rarely speak up or request a tray because having to continually ask and wait for these accommodations is painful, as is the fact it makes you stand out more.
When I was in school I know it was popular to steal the trays to "drift" with. I also see another commenter saying they would use them for sledding. I wonder how theft factored into their decision.
Ha. This is actually exactly what happened at my university. Everyone used to use them as sleds when it would snow, and then the university got rid of them. In retrospect it seems pretty ridiculous - any claim of "money lost" should be rebutted with the cost of tuition that increases every single year.
Now I wonder about combating this type of theft? Is there any dishwasher anti-theft stickers? Just slap one on each tray and even a plate and then install needed gates at doorways... Seems relatively simple and commodity solution.
Yep, but they're easily available from the cafeteria right when the blizzard hits. Right when other sledding equipment is likely to be sold out from stores (stores that don't sell commercial-grade trays, at any price..). Plastic sleds (especially the flexible rectangles with the single handle) are cheap in bulk - maybe stockpiling them on behalf of the would-be tray borrowers, could help?
I find it amusing that the article specifically mentions salad towards the end, as that was my reason for deciding to pilfer a tray. My regular meal was a small entree, a large plate of salad, and a drink. That is three items, but I only have two hands.