GLENVILLE, W.Va. (AP) - Crammed on middle linebacker
Derek Walker's plate are beef, mashed potatoes, gravy, corn, spinach and a roll.
In the other hand, he balances a salad and a bottle of hot sauce. He lumbers
through the small, tabled-filled cafeteria and plunks down without spilling a
drop.
All without a tray.
"You've just got to do with what you have," Walker said.
Glenville State has joined an increasing number of colleges and universities
that have shed their cafeteria trays.
In drought-stricken Georgia and North Carolina, the goal is to conserve
water by lightening the load on dishwashers. Other schools are trying to cut
down on wasted food and conserve energy. Proponents, including major food
vendors, say it also reduces the use of water-polluting detergents.
But no trays?
Students will have to find another way to sled in the winter. And imagine
the surprise of Bluto Blutarsky, who piled his tray high, using some of the
heaping portions to start a food fight in the 1978 film, "National Lampoon's
Animal House."
Advocates of the trayless cafeterias say if students can't pile on the food
as Bluto did, they might consume fewer calories and keep off those unhealthy
pounds often gained in college.
Try telling that to hungry coeds who simply make more trips to the counter.
"I'll just keep coming back for seconds," said Jeff Lyke, a freshman at
Glenville State, which started going trayless in April to coincide with Earth
Day.
"It speaks well for our institution's consciousness in preventing an
otherwise needless waste," said Glenville President Peter Barr.
Convincing the central West Virginia school's nearly 1,400 students,
however, could take time.
"I think that's kind of ridiculous," said freshman Rebecca Riffle, who used
a legal-size notebook to help carry her plate to a table. "Whenever there's a
bunch of people here at one time, it gets crazy. You have people bumping into
you, so if you're balancing stuff, you're going to end up dropping something or
breaking something."
But students all over the country might have to get used to it.
Fifty to 60 percent of Philadelphia-based Aramark's 500 campus partners and
230 of the 600 colleges and universities served by Gaithersburg, Md.-based
Sodexo are expected to dump their trays, company officials said.
At least 23 of the 625 schools belonging to the Okemos, Mich.-based National
Association of College & University Food Services have adopted the idea so far.
Most of those schools operate their food services independently.
It's too soon to measure cost savings nationwide. But five times more energy
and water are consumed in dining halls than any other square foot on college
campuses, said Sodexo spokeswoman Monica Zimmer.
"So if a college is looking to go 'green,' they need to start looking in the
dining facility," Zimmer said.
Georgia Tech, enrollment 18,000, has saved 3,000 gallons of water per day
without trays, she said.
The 50,000-student University of Florida estimates it will save 470,000
gallons annually. At the 2,000-student University of Maine at Farmington, which
went trayless in February 2007, the tally is 288,000 gallons, said Aramark
spokesman Dave Gargione.
Broken dishes from a lack of trays have been taken into account at
Glenville, which has bought extra plates and cups, but Gargione said he hasn't
heard about such a trend nationally.
Aramark conducted a study of 92,000 students, faculty and staff at 300
institutions and found that 79 percent indicated they would accept eating off
plates instead of trays. Another Aramark study of 186,000 meals served at 25
institutions found that when trays weren't used, food waste per person was
reduced 25 percent to 30 percent.
At Glenville's Mollohan's Restaurant, one of two places to eat on campus,
food waste has been reduced from three, five-gallon buckets to just one per day,
said Stephen Shattuck, Aramark's food service director at Glenville.
Some schools are experimenting in a few trayless cafeterias before going
campuswide.
"This is gaining steam all over the country," said Gail Campana, director of
publications and marketing for the food services association. "It's going faster
in some places than others because you have different cultures and different
ways that universities do things."
Fortunately for Blutarsky, the University of Oregon's Erb Memorial Union,
where Belushi's famous food fight scene was filmed at the "Fishbowl" food court,
still makes trays available.
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