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 st

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.)