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> 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
by gnicholas 4y ago
> 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?
- LarsAlereon 4y agoWe want people to eat salad instead of other food, not in addition to it.
- gnicholas 4y agoThere's no indication that they were doing this, unless I missed something.
- moralestapia 4y agoNo. Salad + dessert is better than just dessert.
- april_22 4y agoSince the carbon footprint of meat is so high, some university cafeterias in Germany basically completely banned meat from their menus, which - I think - is a pretty smart step towards reducing emissions and becoming more sustainable. https://you.com/search?q=Berlin+Drops+96+Percent+Of+Meat+From+University+Menus https://you.com/search?q=Berlin+Drops+96+Percent+Of+Meat+Fro...
- benj111 4y agoIs it? I don't know what the system is in Germany but if it's prepaid and fully catered you're basically foisting vegetarianism on everyone. Are the university bosses vegetarian when they go home? Are they doing everything else to minimise their carbon footprint?
- Mwow 4y agoWhat do you mean by vegetarian? Do you assume, just because people don't get meat in one cantina they are no longer allowed to eat meat by themselves? No one is a vegetarian just because they are not getting it brought to them on a silver plate. You do know that eating that much meat is a relatively new development right? A meat day should be the sane default not a vegetarian day in a cafeteria...
- euroderf 4y agoTry thinking of meat as a flavoring to be added to dishes, not as a big honking hunk of dead flesh plopped onto a platter.
- dehrmann 4y agoI'm not sold on this. By the time I add enough things to make a salad filling, I might as well not eat the salad.
- kghe3X 4y agoTaking salad != eating salad
- gnicholas 4y agoTrue! 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 4y agoThat 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.)