[HN Gopher] The case of the vanishing cafeteria tray
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The case of the vanishing cafeteria tray
Author : imartin2k
Score : 51 points
Date : 2022-06-15 07:47 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (reasonstobecheerful.world)
(TXT) w3m dump (reasonstobecheerful.world)
| throwaway742 wrote:
| When I was in school I know it was popular to steal the trays to
| "drift" with. I also see another commenter saying they would use
| them for sledding. I wonder how theft factored into their
| decision.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFcwYGVnxyY
| dijonman2 wrote:
| What the article misses is what replaces dining trays. You still
| have plates, right? Or is it shifting to single use containers?
| bombcar wrote:
| Exactly, and they buried at the bottom:
|
| > 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.
| foobarian wrote:
| Hopefully not plastic/styro plates.
| fisxo wrote:
| Exactly. A few paragraphs in I started skimming for some
| mention of what they replaced trays with. There was nothing.
| When I went to university there were plastic plates, which
| amounts to the same thing as trays in regard to the cleaning
| that the article talks about. Are they using paper dishes?
| Having students supply their own?
| secabeen wrote:
| No no. The idea is that before, you had plates and bowls
| sitting on top of a tray. All had to be washed and
| disinfected. Now you don't have the tray, the students carry
| their plates in their hand directly. No tray to wash.
| jaywalk wrote:
| I had the same thought. I think they just make the students
| carry the plates without a tray?
| bargle0 wrote:
| Cafeteria trays disappeared from dining halls at my alma mater
| when they were pilfered and repurposed in to sleds for the 1996
| blizzard.
| chao- wrote:
| Over a decade ago, during my final year there, my university
| removed their trays. I simply took one from the servery prior to
| the date of their removal, and continued to bring it with me and
| happily use it for myself. I regularly had people ask where I had
| found the tray, presumably hoping that they had been brought
| back.
|
| 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.
| teachrdan wrote:
| Trays were a staple of spontaneous sledding at my university.
| clairity wrote:
| cornell was well known for this, given the combination of
| lots of snow and a big hillside.
| Ichthypresbyter wrote:
| There was one time when they were explicitly allowed to be
| used as paddles during the Cardboard Boat Race (otherwise the
| boat, including its means of propulsion, had to be made
| entirely from cardboard, PVA glue and duct tape).
|
| 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...
| sharkweek wrote:
| Vivid memory using one as a shield in a dorm floor nerf war.
| syntheweave wrote:
| I bought some cafe trays off Amazon a few years back for
| organizational purposes. I've never ate from them though they
| are clearly fit for it - but they're just a great all-purpose
| space divider and stack well when unused. I even use them in
| the fridge to create some slide-out space without a drawer.
| Combine with some smaller tray divider systems and shelving and
| you can clear up a lot of small odds-and-ends piles without
| banishing them to a box.
| bombcar wrote:
| For those in a similar situation, you can get a tray from
| Amazon or a local restaurant supply for real cheap.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| TIL I need a tray. God, imagine the stress-free life.
|
| I'm curious, is your tray branded? I remember my university had
| their mascot & logo on the tray.
| 88913527 wrote:
| The idea of having to transport a tray -- a large, bulky
| awkward item -- just so I can utilize it at the cafeteria seems
| more inconvenient than foregoing the benefits of having it
| while in the cafe.
| fsckboy wrote:
| it's just the backplane of your backpack.
| gnicholas wrote:
| > _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._
|
| Seems like an important finding, and one that could cut against
| removing trays. Don't we want people to be eating salads?
| kghe3X wrote:
| Taking salad != eating salad
| gnicholas wrote:
| True! But not taking salad means not eating salad. Also,
| people typically eat salad first, at least where I live (US).
| So it's not likely they're already full by the time they get
| to it.
| gwern wrote:
| That that is buried at the end as a throwaway joke, when it's
| the only relevant (and quite concerning) statistic in the
| article, is revealing. No surveys, no student comments, no
| retention estimates - plenty of statistics about how much the
| universities like it, though. The article is an exercise in
| one-sided cost-benefit, which considers only the reduction in
| costs to the university as a benefit, while denying the costs
| and lost benefits to others.
|
| 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.)
| LarsAlereon wrote:
| We want people to eat salad instead of other food, not in
| addition to it.
| moralestapia wrote:
| No.
|
| Salad + dessert is better than just dessert.
| gnicholas wrote:
| There's no indication that they were doing this, unless I
| missed something.
| bee_rider wrote:
| How big of a deal is food waste environmentally?
|
| 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.
| rr888 wrote:
| Food waste is great as food for pigs. Not sure how many farmers
| collect in big cities though.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> How big of a deal is food waste environmentally?_
|
| 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.
| vnorilo wrote:
| According to our world in data, it's 6% of carbon emissions, a
| significant chunk!
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/food-waste-emissions
| Karellen wrote:
| Right, but the carbon in food comes from plants (or, comes
| from things that got their carbon from plants) which got
| their carbon out of the atmosphere from recent
| photosynthesis. It's carbon that's already part of the carbon
| cycle, which is a dynamic but overall steady-state system.
|
| 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.
| vnorilo wrote:
| It is mostly the energy used to produce and transport the
| food and other required inputs (like fertilizer), not so
| much the gases it belches out in compost.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| We use a lot of petroleum to generate food; fertilizer,
| mechanized equipment, refrigerating & transporting said
| food, etc.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Also as food is quite a lot of water I would imagine
| cooking or even heating it is not very low point of
| consumption either. And I don't think we are very
| efficient with waste heat of the process.
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| Food waste is deeply necessary. If the amount of annual food
| waste is less than the unavoidable year to year variance in
| food production, you get occasional famines.
| [deleted]
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| The biggest component of food waste environmental impact is not
| the food itself, but all the components of making the food.
|
| 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.
| aendruk wrote:
| If you're having trouble seeing the article content, this is the
| relevant issue:
|
| https://github.com/michalsnik/aos/issues/541
| [deleted]
| hirundo wrote:
| 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?
| cmbuck wrote:
| 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.
| true_religion wrote:
| 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.
| Tyr42 wrote:
| > 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.
| happyopossum wrote:
| 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.
| yborg wrote:
| 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.
| robonerd wrote:
| 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.
| smegsicle wrote:
| > 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
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Apple seeds in sufficient quantities will induce vomiting.
| saagarjha wrote:
| That quantity is definitely lower than what you'd be able
| to eat in apples.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| 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.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| 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.
| vageli wrote:
| > 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."
| saagarjha wrote:
| As someone who grew up in a pretty strict "no food waste"
| household I can say that juggling around four plates just because
| the college thought I was going to dump most of it in the trash
| sucked. Hearing someone dropping a plate was at least a weekly
| occurrence in the dining halls.
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| Did anyone study the time waste of having to go back to the line
| multiple times?
| p1mrx wrote:
| Why would they study something that makes the plan look bad?
| taylorius wrote:
| Every person is just a mouse in a maze these days - we're all
| subject to a constant barrage of subliminal A/B testing to
| "nudge" us in whatever direction some technocrat has decided this
| week. I suppose being left to our own devices is out of the
| question?
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| You're right about how ubiquitous it is and it's awful. It's
| like collectively we've decided that the best way to get people
| to do what we want isn't to try to convince them of our idea's
| benefits, but to make their lives unpleasant and/or
| inconvenient if they don't adopt it. It's infuriating.
| savanaly wrote:
| They were providing you the trays outright before-- was that
| being left to your own devices? Seems the more natural and
| primitive state is letting you get your food and if you see fit
| to obtain a tray to eat it with well no one's stopping you.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| We lost the concept of individual agency. I blame attempts at
| scaling too much.
| gedy wrote:
| I wonder sometimes if people having smaller families, delaying
| children, and spending more time away from home is then
| projecting some people's nannying instincts and hand-wringing
| about behavior that used to be focused inside a family upon
| everyone else.
| wolpoli wrote:
| These behavioral nudges are desirable for decision makers
| because they can push people into behaving a certain way
| without needing to explicitly write down or put up posters
| about them. In other words, doing things this way has a much
| lower change of the public pushing back.
| gkop wrote:
| Poorly researched. Usually the vanished trays appear again on
| their own, after the snow has melted.
| colpabar wrote:
| Ha. This is actually exactly what happened at my university.
| Everyone used to use them as sleds when it would snow, and then
| the university got rid of them. In retrospect it seems pretty
| ridiculous - any claim of "money lost" should be rebutted with
| the cost of tuition that increases every single year.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Now I wonder about combating this type of theft? Is there any
| dishwasher anti-theft stickers? Just slap one on each tray
| and even a plate and then install needed gates at doorways...
| Seems relatively simple and commodity solution.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Trays are a couple dollars.
| gkop wrote:
| Yep, but they're _easily available from the cafeteria
| right when the blizzard hits_. Right when other sledding
| equipment is likely to be sold out from stores (stores
| that don 't sell commercial-grade trays, at any price..).
| Plastic sleds (especially the flexible rectangles with
| the single handle) are cheap in bulk - maybe stockpiling
| them on behalf of the would-be tray borrowers, could
| help?
| simonsarris wrote:
| > At American University, which eliminated cafeteria trays, one
| study indicated the move would save 13 tons of food every
| semester
|
| 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.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Dining halls are pretty convenient IMO.
|
| * 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.
| citizenkeen wrote:
| Not all dining halls are all-you-can-eat buffets. Plenty
| charge you per item.
| irrational wrote:
| > nutritional balance calculus.
|
| 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.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Hey, that was your choice, right? College students _are_
| adults after all.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Not when it comes to signing their name on a student loan
| document.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| > _more efficient -- no need to bill for every item_
|
| 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.
| stordoff wrote:
| My Cambridge (UK) college billed per item, and I not sure you
| lose all of those advantages.
|
| > 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.
| bee_rider wrote:
| But that's the UK. We're not happy in the US until we've
| made everything in education into an assembly line.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| What they describe is pretty much how it works in my
| local elementary/middle schools.
| [deleted]
| Zigurd wrote:
| This "People that pay for each component of each meal probably
| waste considerably less..." is one of those arguments that
| depend on Economic Man being real. It is in fact rational to
| pay flat rates even when some subset of the population gets
| outsize benefits and others pay more than they otherwise would.
| That's why your ISP bill is flat rate (albeit with a cap). That
| means that within a wide range of use cases, your bill is
| predictable.
|
| 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.
| mejutoco wrote:
| I find the point about predictability interesting.
|
| 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.
| mwcremer wrote:
| Apparently they tried that at CalTech in the 70's, and then re-
| instated the dining halls at the behest of parents after a
| significant percentage of the undergraduates showed symptoms of
| malnutrition.
| antognini wrote:
| I can certainly believe it. One of my friends at Caltech
| spent a term eating nothing but instant ramen and green tea.
| By the end of the term he became very sick and his gums
| started bleeding. Once someone pointed out that it looked
| like he had scurvy he drank a quart of orange juice and his
| symptoms went away.
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