Collegiate Times

The recent changes to dining service at D2 and Shultz may strike some students as an odd subversion of classic cafeteria protocol, perhaps even an un-American one.

For as long as any of us can remember, the first step in acquiring a meal in a buffet-type scenario has been grabbing a tray from a neatly piled stack before determining the best way to arrange plates, bowls and the like so as to fit as much food as possible on it. This is a ritual exercise in productive problem solving that generations of us who have been faced with the tantalizing prospect of the "all you can eat" dining experience have practiced. But the art of tray arrangement is now a thing of the past as a result of a bold move by Housing and Dining Services -- removing trays to reduce wasted food. And about time, too.

There are those, no doubt, who feel that such a change in policy seems like a statist act of social engineering running counter to our deep tradition of freedom of choice in this country. While no one expects the administration at Virginia Tech to be as responsive to claims of diminished freedoms as one would hope our local, state or federal government would be, we might still feel that our right to choose exactly how to convey our food from one place to another is being needlessly abrogated. What can justify such a move?

Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, it works. In tests conducted this past spring it was found that the removal of trays reduced the amount of wasted food by almost 30 percent. This is a remarkable result and one that lends a tremendous amount of weight to the argument in favor of the change (which the administration promises will be permanent).

This effect, however, might be seen as an unjustifiable benefit by someone who felt that our right to trays trumped any benefit gained by regulating our access to them. But we never truly had unlimited access to food even when trays were available; for example, we're typically not allowed to bring buckets into cafeterias to carry food away with us in. The tray is not truly central to the experience -- it's just a conventional method of helping us get food from kitchen to table -- so losing it shouldn't be seen as too great a hardship, especially when the magnitude of the decreased waste is considered.

A new consensus has been forged, and this is but a small instance of it between two historically opposed ideological movements: libertarians and paternalists. A classic example of this type of statistically motivated policy change is that of organ donation. In counties where electing for donation is opt-in (the default state being "no donation"), donation rates are low, but in countries where the arrangement is opt-out (the default state being "donation"), donation rates are considerably higher. There's no real difference between the two situations -- both offer freedom of choice -- but the actual results can be strikingly different.

The coalition of campus environmental groups who lobbied for this have won an environmental victory without sacrificing anything meaningful. After all, if you want seconds, you just take another calorie-burning walk back to the food. Isn't it great when things turn out to be win-win?

The editorial board is composed of David Grant, David Harries, Sharon Pritz, Laurel Colella and David McIlroy.