At ground zero of YDS waste

Dining hall dishrooms are perhaps the most depressing places at Yale. Having worked in the Ezra Stiles/Morse and Saybrook dishrooms for the past three years, I have been best able to see the student body for what it is—a congregation of clueless, hypocritical, and delusional people.

ERIN I. LEWIS/YH

Being forced to throw away food left on students' trays has been the most difficult and heart-wrenching task I have been ever asked to perform. I have seen students casually pass back trays with plates of food untouched—with entire pieces of fruit, bread crusts, sandwiches, hamburgers and rice left on the trays. An empty, clean plate is a rarity.

Students here seem to pride themselves on their "social responsibility," their "liberality," and their never-ending quest for social justice. Many students have, for example, thrown themselves into public discussion over sweatshops and the flaws of American electoral democracy. But how concerned are you "justice seekers" with the amount of food that you and your friends waste at every meal? Every two seconds, someone in the world dies of either malnutrition or malnourishment, the vast majority being children.

I ask you, was that crust of your sandwich not food? Was that milk you neglected to drink along with your cereal not nourishing? Can you manage to deceive yourself about the lack of respect with which you are treating your access to such precious sustenance? For all those "environmentalists" out there, can you continue to collectively over-consume, knowing full well that overconsumption necessitates overproduction, accompanied by untold environmental damage? Take a look at the rainforests of the world being cleared for beef production. Moreover, remember that the unnecessary slaughter of an animal is on your conscience the next time you waste meat or meat products.

It would be unfair to lay all of the blame on the student body. It seems an entire culture of wasting food has spread to all aspects of our dining halls. Tremendous amounts of food are wasted every meal when the serving line is taken down—for the most part, any unserved food is automatically thrown away. In addition, most of the items on the deli and salad bars end up in the trash at the end of the night, although they could easily be saved for use the next day. I have, for example, personally dumped entire glass bowls of peanut butter and jelly down the garbage disposal. Olives, pickles, lettuce, broccoli, cheese, sandwich meats—they all end up in the trash. Most managers, moreover, are not present in the dining hall at the time of the take-down of the line and salad and deli bars to supervise the handling of leftovers.

I have, with varying degrees of success, tried to initiate programs of wrapping leftover food from the serving line and salad and deli bars to be picked up by soup kitchens the next morning. My attempts were, however, an aberration from standard dining hall procedure, and therefore only took place those evenings when I was personally able to come in and wrap food. Saving food in the dining halls should not be the responsibility of a single, interested individual, but rather the objective of the dining halls themselves. If reliable recipients for the wrapped food are found (and they exist!) every dining hall ought to, daily, wrap all leftover, salvageable food from the serving lines and deli and salad bars for those recipients.

The waste I have been forced to witness is a tremendous display of disrespect for those who suffer and die without nourishment, for the human effort that has allowed the food to reach your table, and for the environment that had to be exploited to produce it. Both the student body and the dining hall management ought to consider the effects of their wasteful and shameful behavior. Damian Brown is a senior in Saybrook.

Back to Opinion...