Reasons For Going Trayless Inaccurately Portrayed

2/25/08
Daily Campus

A few weeks ago a story ("Whitney Experiments With Trayless Service," Jan. 25) ran about the trayless experiment in Whitney Dining Hall to begin this month. An editorial ("Whitney Dining Hall Should Keep Trays," Jan. 28) bashing the idea appeared shortly after. Both pieces got an important aspect of the trayless project wrong. The trayless experiment is primarily about reducing food waste, not conserving water. Encouraging healthier eating habits and saving water and energy are just icing on the cake.

Using trays allow students to take much more food than they can and should attempt to eat. Hence the tendency for freshman to gain weight and the enormous amount of food waste UConn generates. Removing trays from dining halls is not a novel idea. Many other schools including Colby, Harvard, Brown and others have trayless initiatives that have resulted in substantial reductions in food waste. Some students prefer trayless dining, noting it feels more normal and more like eating at home. At some schools where trays are still available students are so committed to reducing food waste that picking up a tray will draw stares as if you were stealing candy from a baby.

So what is the big problem with wasting food? Take one look at where their food comes from and how it is produced, and the absurdity of wasting it becomes clear. Most commercially grown food, especially meat, is produced using substantial amounts of energy and chemical inputs. Crops and livestock are grown using antibiotics, growth hormones, synthetic fertilizers, pesticide and herbicides which pollute and degrade our soil, water, and air. After growing and processing - and slaughtering if it's meat - food is transported an average of 1,500 miles to its destination.

Once the food arrives in dining halls, students take a portion, often eat more than they need, and throw what they can't eat in the garbage to be land filled or incinerated. Meanwhile, Americans are the most obese people in the world while in other parts there are hundreds of millions of malnourished people. Granted, reducing food waste might not help starving people on the other side of the planet, but I would hope that a well-educated college student would at least consider this situation before taking a third piece of pizza they probably won't be able to finish.

The trayless experiment is not some evil scheme devised to make student life more difficult and save water (the university is looking into many other ways to reduce our water consumption). Rather, the trayless experiment is about a well-educated university community looking to do the right thing, by reducing our impact on our environment, promoting healthy eating habits and at the very least not taking a basic necessity that many people are without for granted.


- Dan Britton,

Sustainability Coordinator,

UConn Office of Environmental Policy.