Imagine being a college coed who’s stopping by the school cafeteria for a nice dinner. You choose a plate of chicken with mashed potatoes, gravy, corn-on-the-cob and a roll, but you also want a salad, some butter and a beverage. The problem is not finding the money to afford your well-rounded meal; rather there’s not a tray in sight for you to haul your dinner to a table.
You’d laugh if it weren’t so pathetic.
Unfortunately, it’s no joke. In order to save money and the planet, hundreds of colleges and universities around the nation are getting rid of cafeteria trays. In states, such as Georgia and North Carolina, the goal is to conserve water by lightening the load on dishwashers. Meanwhile other schools are ditching trays in order to conserve energy, save money and reduce the use of water-polluting detergents.
School administrators add that by subtracting trays from college cafeterias, students might consume fewer calories and keep off those unhealthy pounds often gained during their freshman year.
But hungry coeds say that’s not going to happen. Students from trayless schools say the new policy is an inconvenience, though it won’t stop them from filling up on their favorite foods. Famished freshmen say they simply make more trips to the counter.
Going trayless has been especially hard for coeds at colleges in West Virginia. Many students there have been forced to MacGyver their own trays out of legal-size notebooks and binders. Meanwhile, other students reveal that they have perfected the fine art of balancing meals, drinks and condiments sans trays, but not without complaints.
Unfortunately, there is little students can do to stop the tray dumping. In fact, this fall hundreds of other college and university cafeterias will be operating without trays as well.
According to reports, 50 to 60 percent of Philadelphia-based Aramark’s 500 campus partners and 230 of the 600 colleges and universities served by Gaithersburg, Maryland-based Sodexo are doing away with trays. That’s in addition to the dozens of schools belonging to the National Association of College & University Food Services.
Schools like Georgia Tech, which has an enrollment of 18,000, has gone trayless and administrators there say they saved 3,000 gallons of water per day by doing so. Meanwhile, at 50,000-student University of Florida, 470,000 gallons of water were saved last year after the school got rid of its cafeteria trays.
What do you make of the trayless concept?
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