Are UConn Students Carrying Away More Food Than They Eat? 
Hoping to reduce waste, university will try ban on dining hall trays

By, Jenna Cho
2-11-2008
www.theday.com

For college students on meal plans, all-you-can-eat is a fact of life.

The result? They pile food onto trays and then throw it away because, as the saying goes, the eyes are bigger than the tummy.

So colleges around the country are addressing excessive food waste by experimenting with removing trays from dining halls. Administrators want to see if students will take less food, and waste less, without the extra room that trays provide.

“It's easy to pile up a bunch of food on a tray just because you have a tray,” said Daniel Britton, sustainability coordinator of the University of Connecticut's Office of Environmental Policy in Storrs. “You sit down, and you can't actually eat all the food you've taken.”

Starting today, the university will start a three-week test at its smallest dining hall, Whitney, to see how effective the removal of trays is in reducing food waste. Whitney feeds about 250 to 300 students during dinner hours, when the experiment will take place, said Rebecca Gorin, assistant manager of Whitney.

The experiment will start with what Britton called “a food waste audit.” Whitney will continue to provide trays the first week but at the end of dinner will weigh all solid foods left on trays, Gorin said.

The second week will consist of an “educational campaign,” when the university will use posters and a chart of documented food waste to inform the students at Whitney about how much food is discarded every day and about the social, environmental and health issues associated with food waste, said Britton.

“And just encouraging our diners to think about, not only the energy that's involved in providing the food ... but also, the farmers that give their labor to it, and the animals that give their lives to it,” said Gorin.

The trays will disappear the third week.

Other colleges have gone trayless on a trial basis. There are Trayless Tuesdays and Thursdays at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. And Alfred University in Alfred, N.Y., went trayless this semester but makes provisions for students with disabilities.

The elimination of trays has meant some reduction in water usage at Alfred. At UConn, which has faced limited water supplies in recent years, that could be “the icing on the cake,” Britton said.

“I think if we make students aware of all the issues that are associated with food waste, I think if we get them to give it any level of thought, I'd imagine that they would have a hard time not agreeing that it's the right thing to do,” said Britton.

College students have had mixed reactions to the idea.

An editorial in The Harvard Crimson, Harvard University's student newspaper, supported the initiative there to experiment with the removal of dining-hall trays.

“Asking Harvard undergraduates to substantially reform their diets and food habits, for instance, would be a futile task, but asking them simply to forgo a tray is hardly a giant personal sacrifice,” the editorial, dated Tuesday, reads.

Meanwhile, an editorial in UConn's student newspaper, The Daily Campus, is skeptical of the tray test at Whitney. The editorial, which ran Jan. 28, points out that diners just don't have enough hands to carry all the food they eat.

Eliminating trays would mean more trips to food lines and more spills on tables and floors, the editorial states.

“All that removing trays will accomplish is making visiting the dining hall a more unpleasant and time-consuming experience than it already is,” the editorial reads.

Gorin disagrees.

“You can come up as many times as you want to get food,” she said. “I hope that students won't see it as us taking something away. It's another form of education on campus, really, (to) learn about what you eat, how you consume, affects the world around you.”