Dining Halls To Replace Wasteful Trays, Plates, Silverware With Troughs

Story by Ben Plowman 

| Published Oct 28, 2008

In response to the growing popularity of trayless dining among colleges nationwide, where dining halls remove trays in order to reduce food waste, UNL Dining Services has announced that it will take things one step further this spring by replacing all trays, plates, cups and silverware with communal troughs. The announcement comes after considerable deliberation on the part of Dining Services about the best ways to save money and become more environmentally friendly.

According to the Assistant Director of Dining Services Pam Edwards, "Removing trays limits a student’s ability to grab more food than he or she can eat and so limits the amount that goes to waste. Additionally, not having to wash trays saves on water and labor. Plates and cups, however, can still be sources of waste and excess. The trough system effectively eliminates this extra waste by only allowing a student to hold the food that is currently in his or her mouth."

When trayless dining was first considered, dining center staff were unsatisfied with the resulting savings and so turned their attention to other potential areas of waste.

“What it comes down to is we are wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars every year washing dishes, throwing away perfectly good food, and cooking separate dishes with distinct flavors instead of producing buckets of slop,” Edwards said.

This latest change comes in a long line of ideas implemented by campus dining centers to eliminate waste. Starting in 2005, dining center hours have been reduced yearly so that students have fewer opportunities to waste precious food and natural resources. Food quality has also been reduced dramatically in recent years so as to encourage students to find their own food off campus, thus saving dining services additional money.

Most dramatically, in Fall of 2002, UNL dining halls began to stop serving food for one hour every afternoon to throw away all breakfast and lunch food, keeping it out of the wasteful hands of students.

As a proof of concept of the new trough-style dining, a test-run was held late last week in Selleck, with over one hundred students showing up to give the new system a try.

“At first the students seemed a little scared and skittish,” recalled Cheryl Bishop, desk worker at Selleck. “But then one of the chefs let out a high-pitched ‘Sooo-eeee!’ and the students all began to bustle in.”

Freshman Catherine Worrick, one of the students who participated in the trial, said she was surprised at how quickly she warmed up to the idea of trough-style dining. “I was initially opposed to trough-style dining because it’s wildly inconvenient and replaces responsibility with a blanket policy,” she said.

“But once they poured that slop in front of me I couldn’t stop until I ate my fill,” Worrick added.

Edwards said that in the future Dining Services is looking to make the full switch to foodless dining, where students pay $7 a meal in order to not eat, therefore not wasting any food at all.