College eating 2009: With an eye to healthy bodies and a healthy planet, college dining changes
In the University of Massachusetts dining commons, what students don’t know could help them.
The university has embarked on a slightly sneaky method of getting students to enjoy more nutritionally balanced meals.
An expanded array of fresh fruit has inched its way onto the buffet. Cooks are adding whole grains into flour-based edibles, replacing iodized salt with the lower-sodium sea salt, and swapping out meat for fish in a number of entrées. They are also dishing out smaller quantities.
Kenneth K. Toong, executive director of food services at UMass Amherst, calls it stealth health.
In so doing, Toong took a page from a book parents have used for years in finding ways to get nutritious food into their children on the sly.
“Essentially, we use healthy ingredients, but we’re not labeling them,” said Toong.
These are just some of the changes cropping up at dining services as area colleges seek to become both more health-conscious and environmentally friendly.
In other words, gone is your parents’ world of collegiate dining, where waste and excess was part of the ambiance.
Welcome to college dining 2009.
Pressured by students locally and nationally, college and university dining services have turned mealtime into another arena to make better choices for the environment, society, and individual health.
“Things have changed tremendously,” said Kathryn J. Gay, Mount Holyoke College’s menu coordinator, who has 22 years in dining service experience.
“There’s a lot more variety, and students’ tastes have changed,” she said.
Better for the environment
In the Valley, such changes have been introduced in stages since 2000. The five campuses have composting programs to reduce waste. The five dining providers all have local produce purchasing agreements to cut down on transportation pollution, save money and provide fewer processed foods to students.
The University of Massachusetts and Smith College have gotten rid of dining room trays, the theory being if students don’t have an easy way to take more food than they will eat, there will be less waste. Trayless dining also saves water and energy involved in cleanup, and thereby cash. Amherst College is experimenting with kicking trays as well.
“Green initiatives are currently a big issue people are trying to address around the country,” said Charles G. Thompson, director of dining services at Amherst College. “We’re all trying to reduce the food waste and reduce the carbon footprint and save money.”
Thompson ran into some student resistance when he took cafeteria trays away from students there.
Thompson had heard from dining services colleagues around the nation stories of students stuffing cardboard boxes with food as a crude substitute for trays, or skaters piling grilled cheeses onto their boards.
There were no such antics at Amherst, though a few undergrads demonstrated displeasure.
A stack of dirty dishes was left teetering on a table top with a note that read, “This is what could happen if we go trayless.”
“There were some minor pranks like that,” said Thompson with a chuckle. “This was our first stab at it. I’m sure we’ll have more discussions.”
It might have been an inconvenience in the all-you-can-eat buffet of college dining, but by forgoing trays for one day, Amherst reduced food waste by 100 pounds.
“We could be looking at about 15,000-20,000 pounds less food waste in one year,” Thompson said.
The college could also save 167,000 gallons of water per year by not having to wash trays.
“No one loses by doing this,” Thompson added. “It’s a matter of getting beyond the inconvenience factor to the customer.”
Nutritionally speaking
But pushing for high-minded dining is sometimes easier said than done, even with student support.
About five years ago, Mount Holyoke College launched an online nutrition analyzer, a program that quickly deciphers the caloric and nutritional value of everything on the college’s dining hall menu.
The college did this, said Gay, because students were asking for greater transparency.
Today, however, the site is little used, she said.
Knowing that you should be making healthy food choices and actually making them can be worlds apart.
“It’s like, students say they don’t want french fries, but what’s the first thing that’s gone,” Gay said.
“Sometimes they say one thing and do another,” she said.
At UMass, students unknowingly eat whole wheat chocolate chip cookies and have, for the most part, increased the ratio of fish they consume by about 20 percent.
UMass has also reduced portions on its all-you-can-eat student meal programs. Instead of full-size cheeseburgers, the university now serves “sliders,” an appetizer portion of beef. UMass has also reduced the size of a fish entrée from 4 ounces to 2 ounces. Students can return to the buffet for as many portions as they like.
“It’s quality over quantity,” said Gavin Galloway, a UMass junior who was having lunch at the Berkshire Dining Commons.
For the most part, students said they didn’t mind the smaller portions.
Sitting at a booth with three friends, Samantha Barry, a freshman, fits all she can eat on a single plate, said “The amount of food you get is fine.”
But her friend, Wei Yuh Chang, said he needs to make five trips to the buffet to feel satiated.
“If you want more,” he said, “you can just go back.”