The case of the vanishing cafeteria tray
reasonstobecheerful.world
reasonstobecheerful.world
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'm curious, is your tray branded? I remember my university had their mascot & logo on the tray.
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...
Seems like an important finding, and one that could cut against removing trays. Don't we want people to be eating salads?
Salad + dessert is better than just dessert.
https://you.com/search?q=Berlin+Drops+96+Percent+Of+Meat+Fro...
Are the university bosses vegetarian when they go home? Are they doing everything else to minimise their carbon footprint?
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...
If this is still good food and cheap enough I still feel this is totally okay.
Which is why I qualified the statement.
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.)
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).
Plus is is a nice community space.
> 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.
And probably not just with time efficiency. The dining hall has economies of scale compared to putting a kitchenette in every dorm room/suite.
It's almost definitely more space efficient. It's probably also more energy efficient.
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.
That’s the calculus you avoided.
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.
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.
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?
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.
That could be less portion size, or simply by skipping dessert.
So maybe skipping salad instead.
I'd imagine the top photo was chosen for it's color and whimsy.
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.
"An apple a day saves us a tray."
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.
not to mention the immune-system boost of whatever grime is stuck around the stem
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.
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.
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.
Where it's thrown into the trash.
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.
* 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.
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.