Dining at the University is flawed. The meals could be healthier, students are forced by necessity to buy into plans many don’t want or need and there is a staggering amount of waste both in terms of food thrown away and meal content.
While I understand there needs to be a balance between healthiness and universal appeal, I don’t understand why we can’t have a great combination of both. UVA Dining is wasting resources right now by producing a large variety of different food items that, in my experience, provide variety at the expense of quality. Many people ordinarily settle for the mediocre vastness of our dining halls but could be getting a much more specialized and limited variety of food, which they may enjoy much more, with the same amount of resources spent by the dining hall. UVA Dining should limit the variety it offers and put more resources toward food quality.
While variety of food should be limited, in terms of meal plan types there should be more options, because unlimited meal swipes are both wasteful and unnecessary. Flexibility and convenience is key; a lack of these is what has driven the creation of an independent Corner meal plan that promises better value, higher quality food and convenience with unused swipes. Perhaps people are responding to this because of the problems I have discussed with UVA Dining. An example of the excess and inconvenience of a normal first-year meal plan is the requirement that they purchase unlimited swipes when many don’t eat three meals a day.
Further, the amount of food thrown away per day is horrifying. In October 2011 an audit estimated that around 0.15 pounds per person per meal were thrown away that day for lunch. According to the audit, this was a conservative estimate. This demonstrates just how wasteful our dining system is.
Finally, a page could be taken out of our dear founder Thomas Jefferson’s book. The meals should be drastically rebalanced away from meat and grains toward fruits and vegetables. This would be beneficial both for student health and the environment. Meat is inefficient and Americans already eat too much of it. It takes, according to the beef industry, 441 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef, with more realistic estimates placing that number somewhere between 1,000-1,900 gallons of water per pound of beef. It is also estimated that somewhere between 18 to 51 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions come from the maintenance of livestock. It also takes approximately 8 pounds of grain to make a pound of beef. All of this points to the fact that meat in itself is costly and environmentally unfriendly. If our dining program is to consider the environmental and health-related impacts of what it serves, moving away from meat would be a big step in the right direction. I do know, however, that not everyone is open to such drastic change, so even just a small and occasional rebalancing of meals toward fruits and vegetables without the complete removal of meat would still have a positive effect.
UVA Dining is flawed, but with a waste-reduction program, a shift away from variety to quality and a move away from meat, it can be made into a much healthier and environmentally friendly program. If UVA Dining makes changes, more students would be willing to sign on to get a meal plan which will result in better quality overall for everyone.
Sawan Patel is an Opinion columnist for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at s.patel@cavalierdaily.com.
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