Lottie Trays Are Better off Sleds

I'm walking into Lottie at noon on a Friday and my stomach has been growling for the past half hour. I head to the "serving square" (as I like to call it), grab a fork, knife, and spoon, shove them in my back pocket and stand in line to retrieve whatever delights the chefs at Lottie-Nelson have prepared for the lunchtime crowd. As you may have noticed, I failed to retrieve a tray from the pile of often dripping wet plastic ones stacked conveniently below the silverware. "Why?" you may ask. Well, I have decided to forgo the trays in Lottie. I opt instead to pick and choose my meal portions carefully in order to fit them strategically onto one plate. I then carry this plate, and a beverage of my choice, back to my table in my own two hands. What a concept.

I have been doing this since the beginning of my sophomore year at Messiah College, much to my tablemates' chagrin, for a number of reasons.

First: it makes sense to me that I would be able to fit all that I want to eat, at any given meal, on one plate. If not, guess what? I can make another trip back and get more food!

This type of progressive thinking effects a problem in many pro-tray people's minds: "That is too much hassle when I could just use a tray and get all of the things I want to eat, in one trip." Well yes, you could do that, but here is the issue. Have you ever gone to the grocery store while hungry? You went to buy eggs and left fifty bucks poorer because everything looked great; you loaded your cart with items you didn't need. If your answer was "yes, as a matter of fact I have done that," you understand my point.

We do the same with our trays in Lottie, loading them up with things that we don't need and aren't going to eat. Trouble is, the things we put on our trays in Lottie that we decide not to eat get thrown away instead of stored in our fridges for a midnight snack. Now, since I am sure that you all read the compelling story about food waste in Lottie that appeared in a previous Swinging Bridge issue, I will not bore you with the details of Lottie's food waste. Here's what you need to know: wasting food is like wasting money. The Lottie-Nelson administrators order food based on how much we take, not how much we eat. We use trays, take a lot of food, and waste a lot of food, which is like wasting money. Want to lower tuition? Let's go trayless!

Second: in a world full of "go green" campaigns and "save the earth" foundations, shouldn't we be concerned about the amount of water we use to wash not only our dishes but our trays as well? Aramark, a large-scale food service company, conducted a survey of 25 colleges/universities that removed trays from their dining halls in order to see how much water they were saving. The conclusion was that 200 gallons of water is saved for every 1,000 meals served during a school year. Let's say as a rough estimate that Lottie serves 1,000 students three meals a day: that's 3,000 meals per day and 600 gallons of water saved each day. The average household uses about 200 gallons of water per day. That means that a family would have to go waterless for three full days to save as much water as Lottie would by going trayless for one!

The third and final reason I have chosen to go trayless is a reason that will only come to fruition if the entire campus goes with me. As many of you know (well, maybe not the First Years), sledding on Cemetery Hill is the best thing to do on a snowy day right before finals when we are all trying to avoid studying. But what makes the sledding experience even better is one of good old Lottie Nelson's sturdy blue trays to protect your butt from the cold hard ground. In the past it has been a tradition for students to try to steal trays from the dining hall for their Cemetery Hill adventures; but if Lottie were to get rid of the trays, they could give them away to the students. Then everyone could have a blue tray-sled!

So, give up your trays and waste less food, water, and money, and get a free sled. What more could you ask for?