Hacker News Reader

Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

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?

View on HN

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.

> the customary way of eating an apple wastes about a third of the apple

not to mention the immune-system boost of whatever grime is stuck around the stem

Apple seeds in sufficient quantities will induce vomiting.

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.

That quantity is definitely lower than what you’d be able to eat in apples.

> An apple weighs around 100g; so eliminating trays saves a third of an apple per diner per meal according to this study

"An apple a day saves us a tray."

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.

Yeah, basically food wastage is reduced by people taking less food in order to fit it on one plate.

That could be less portion size, or simply by skipping dessert.

> 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 maybe skipping salad instead.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com