Derek Owens performs a nifty and somewhat precarious balancing act when he gets his meals at Pomona College.
At lunch one recent day, the freshman from Oregon held a plate of nachos and beans in one hand. In the other, he stacked a serving of pizza and breadstick on top of a fruit juice cup. With silverware deftly added to the pile, he made it to his table without spilling a drop.
Call it eco-dining, or another sign of tough economic times in American academia. Pomona this fall joined a growing number of colleges in California and across the nation that have eliminated cafeteria trays in an effort to reduce food waste, cut water usage and save on energy bills.
Students' reaction has been mixed, but Owens and others say they are adapting for the sake of the environment, their schools' budgets and their own waistlines. If they can't carry all the food they want in their first trip to the serving stations, they say, they will make one or two more. And if they wind up with fewer second helpings of granola or ice cream, so be it.
"It's definitely difficult and a little bit inconvenient," Owens said amid the hubbub of Pomona's Gothic-style Frary Dining Hall. "But I like the intentions. The intentions are good, to be more aware of the environment and all that. So it's a small sacrifice to make."
The trayless college cafeteria is a growing trend, spreading from the Northeast and West Coast to the Midwest and South, said Joseph Spina, executive director of the National Assn. of College and University Food Services. Because it combines business savings with students' interest in sustainability, the change is viewed as a "win-win," he said.
His group does not have a definitive list of trayless schools, but food service companies report that many are shedding the plastic trays. Aramark Higher Education estimates that 60% of the 600 campuses it serves are trayless, and Sodexo Inc., which works at a similar number of schools, says about 40% have switched.
In California, no-tray schools include UC Irvine, UC Riverside, UC Santa Cruz, San Diego State, Loyola Marymount University and all five undergraduate campuses in the Claremont Colleges consortium to which Pomona College belongs. UCLA also expects to be trayless in at least two of its four big student dining halls this fall.
Elsewhere, the University of Minnesota, the University of Connecticut, Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and Middlebury College in Vermont have joined the movement.
