Trays are gone, baby, gone

By: Bryan Murphy

Posted: 9/5/08

As you might've noticed, the University removed the trays available in all of the dining halls except South this semester. There has been a chorus of protest that carrying cups, plates and silverware by hand is an unreasonably difficult to demand, to which I ask: what, exactly, do you do at home, or at Thanksgiving dinner, or when you attend on-campus events with free food? Do you tell Grandma and her secret-recipe shortcakes to shove off because she didn't deliver them to you upon a tray? Do you serve Easy-Mac to yourself upon a platter and eschew the free goodies at campus conferences because all that's provided are paper plates? We've all been eating food without trays for the vast majority of our lives. Those complaining of a plentitude of dropped plates and fumbled cups are almost certainly bemoaning nothing but their own unreasonable attempts to load up in a single run.

"If you want a drink and have your hands full," said Jenna Brancato, a 7th-semester allied health major, "you put the stuff down, then go back and get a drink."

Which brings us to the second-most frequently heard complaint: that the elimination of trays will not truly do much for the sake of environmental welfare, nor effect sizable cost and water savings - a complaint which discredits the university and its planning processes. The university did not implement the trayless policy on a whim and a hunch, said Megh Misset, an assistant student manager of the Whitney dining hall and a researcher in a food-waste study conducted at Whitney last semester.

"We [the university staff] have proof, we have hard numbers," said Ms. Misset, citing the results of the Whitney study. When Whitney switched to a trayless policy, per-person food waste dropped 30 percent, while the load washed by the dish room dropped 24 percent. For a university of our size, that's hundreds of thousands of gallons of water and thousands of pounds of food saved annually.

All of this, of course, does not even take into account the food that is 'wasted' when we eat what is not necessary, when we eat when we are not even hungry. Brian Wansink, a researcher at Cornell, has built his career on researching "mindless eating," and has found that people will gorge themselves on popcorn - even if its incredibly stale, and even if they've just eaten - provided they're offered the popcorn for free in a giant container. In fact, it's almost as if the participants in the study the were provided with free (albeit often tasteless) food on a large tray.

Alexia Lalande, a 5th-semester fine arts major, reaffirmed Wansink's findings. "When I had a tray, I would have a four-course meal by the time I got to the end of the first row of entrees - but if there was something good in another row, I'd take that as well … even though I had plenty to eat."

It would not be a disaster if the newly-precious "real estate" of a single plate forced us to scout and only to take things we like most, rather than piling food onto a tray that we'll later realize we don't even want and either force ourselves to stomach, or toss out.

Americans throw away up to a quarter of the food we prepare each year after that food has been shipped an average of 1,500 miles to arrive at our shelves. Farming takes energy, transport takes energy and food preparation takes energy - meanwhile we all complain about the soaring demand for and cost of oil, which, after all, is simply an energy source.

With environmentalism as chic as it is these days, I wish it were the students pushing for conservation and not the administration.

"It's an example of why it's going to be so hard to get solid conservation practices [adopted] in the United States," said Michael Sanders, a 9th-semester biological sciences and pre-veterinary double major. "This is a college campus, in a pretty liberal state… and [we're] like, 'Man, this is too much work to save thousands of pounds of food.'" The trayless policy is cost-effective and relatively low-sacrifice, and it doesn't preclude the University from doing more for the environment later - though re-adopting trays would be doing less.

Is trayless as convenient as trayful? No. But is it a better idea? Yeah. "We affect our environment, our environment affects us in turn; for years, we've been wasting food, using up energy, using up water and now there's this backlash," said Misset. "The University is changing its behavior in response to the environment… as students, universities are our environment and we need to change our behavior to deal with that. It's just a matter of thinking about the greater good."