This may only happen once, but we've scooped the New York Times. Today's article on trayless dining at universities is good, but nothing earth-shattering if you read ours (Students Have Their Hands Full Saving Food, Energy and Water) in the fall.

The energy and environmental benefits of trayless dining are pretty straightforward. Our story cited that in the United States, "more than 25% of food produced for consumption goes to waste, and food leftovers are the largest component, by weight, of the waste stream in the United States." So, when students lose access to trays, they take less food, and therefore less is wasted, which saves money and also reduces the amount that will eventually produce methane in a landfill if not composted or treated with an anaerobic digester.

But not everyone eliminates the trays out of concern for the environment. The NYT story highlights Skidmore College's trayless program, which began "between the spring and fall semesters in 2006, when the cafeteria, the Murray-Aikins Dining Hall, underwent a $10 million overhaul. For the most part, when students returned in the fall, they were so dazzled by the transformation of the cafeteria that they hardly noticed the missing trays. The renovated dining hall has three slate fireplaces and a half-dozen food stations, including a do-it-yourself griddle for eggs. Three of the chefs are graduates of the Culinary Institute of America, and all the pasta, granola and baked goods are made on site. Officials said their decision to go trayless was mainly about atmosphere, though they welcomed any ecological benefit. 'In our thinking, the trays were institutional, along with the conveyor belts, and we really wanted to move away from that,' said Christine Kaczmarek, director of business services at Skidmore."

Of course, Skidmore is only one school to join a growing trend towards trayless dining, which Jonathan Bloom tracks at Wasted Food. The Sustainable Endowments Institute says that 126 of the 300 schools they monitor have experimented with trayless dining, and one ARAMARK study examined meals at 25 colleges and universities to find that on trayless days, food waste was reduced by 25% to 30% per person, or about one-quarter to one-half pound of food per person per day.

Richard Johnson, the Director of Sustainability for Rice University in Houston, Texas, also blogged on dropping trays, saying, "Back in the kitchen, the H&D staff reported that plate waste had dropped 30% (the same amount as had been achieved by the educational campaign in 2005), and that the use of water, energy, and cleaning chemicals to wash plates and trays had dropped by almost 10%. They were intrigued. On a typical day in this particular dining hall, they would spend about $1000 per lunch period on food costs, not including the labor for preparation or associated utilities. What if they could reduce the amount of food that they needed to prepare? And not just for lunch, but for dinner and breakfast too (which together cost about another $1,000 per day just for the food)?"

He continues: "We have come to discover that removing the tray is akin to removing a keystone, unleashing a variety of benefits. In addition to those already discussed, there are additional energy and labor savings related to reducing the quantity of food to be cooked. Arguably, trayless dining also improves the health of students by discouraging over-eating. I continue to hear from students that they pay more attention to the food that they consume now that the trays are gone."

Image Credit: Dr. Ann C. Wilkie, University of Florida-IFAS

As a warm-up to this year's AASHE conference, I toured Duke University with a group of other sustainability professionals, starting with the swamp.

I imagine most campus visitors don't immediately get dragged out into the marsh, but the interest on everyone's faces was a visible reminder that schools aren't just invested in clean energy, but also in traditional environmental work, such as restoring wetlands. This is particularly true when projects involve students in the process.

The SWAMP (Stream and Wetland Assessment Management Park) project is designed to restore an urban watershed, research several different kinds of wetlands, and purify local water supplies. The work was largely funded by the state of North Carolina because of its positive impact on downstream water quality, with a smaller contribution from the university itself. Students are trained on "real-world restoration techniques, modern hydrologic modeling, and the basic principles of stream, lake, and wetland ecology" as part of their coursework, and they came on the tour with us to answer questions and tell us about the work they've done.

As part of the tour, we also looked at several LEED-Silver campus buildings, counted bike racks, toured a prototype "smart house," and ate a meal of local food from one of the campus cafes. However, for many people the most memorable part of the day was the morning walk through the woods. One attendee remarked, "I love that students are out here doing the work. That happens at a lot of universities, but not enough. Maybe it needs to be more than just the natural science students."

The idea that students and others on campus need to connect better to their surroundings was a common theme of the conference. Between sessions on eco-literacy, local environmental history projects, campus habitats, and Vandana Shiva's appeal to get people back on the land, almost everybody had something to say.

After Janice Crede started taking small groups of students out to a cabin for a week (no laptops or TVs allowed) for a "Nature Immersion" curriculum she piloted at the University of Wisconsin-Superior, she started seeing results. "We wanted to help students understand a little bit more about their impact on the planet. They have a half-hour biology class each day, then we let them loose to explore the lake, the woods, the bog, before we have some conversations about sustainability and leadership. Everything is outside. We eat dinner by the campfire and stay up too late, and by the end of the week they no longer miss their laptops, and they don’t want to leave."

Surveys and open-ended writing assignments that the students complete before and after the course corroborate Crede's thesis: "What they told me is that they come back and they feel changed in their attitudes, perceptions and behaviors. They feel as if they have a whole new group of people they can relate to."   

We are recapping AASHE: Sustainability on Campus and Beyond as it happens. If you were at the sessions we're covering, weigh in with your comments below. Or see others' blogs, photos and Twitter updates on the AASHE live page.

In the space of an hour, Vandana Shiva, physicist and agricultural activist, managed to connect the oil and human labor inputs required by modern agriculture, the nutritional deficit of monocrops, the dangers of species loss, the moisture depletion of agro-chemically treated fields, the imbalance of grain that goes to factory farms rather than human mouths, obesity and diabetes, US grain subsidies, biofuels, the 160,000 annual suicides of Indian farmers who are finding the monocrop seeds they purchased won't grow, and the mass exodus of families from heritage land. The coherent case that emerged at the end was simple: "We must get people back on the land."

One of several sustainable food experts that have earned attention in recent years, Shiva is in good company. Michael Pollan, Frances Moore Lappe, and even Jane Goodall have spent years studying the American industrial food systems and come to similar conclusions.

While agricultural yields increased dramatically in the mid-1900's, the soil depletion that has resulted makes farmers even more dependent on intensive chemical fertilizer and water inputs. Not only is this problematic for the farmers who are increasingly sensitive to drought and price fluctuation, but fertilizers based on fossil fuels could very soon become impossible to obtain, if declining oil predictions are correct. The answer, says Shiva, is biodiversity. "The delicacy that small-scale farming requires, is the delicacy that encourages biodiversity. And biodiversity makes for healthier food.”

As she spoke, Shiva compared universities—and their status within their communities—to the recent election, making the case that just as President-elect Obama will use his advisors to find solutions to the problems facing the nation, "every campus should make its own transition team for food beyond oil. We can create a food system beyond toxics. Beyond genocide."

In fact, she claimed, food is not only an agricultural issue, but integral to national security and peace. "For me, food is about peace. Peace with nature, peace between communities, and peace with our own bodies. Because we are at war with our bodies now, and food has become ammunition."

She went on to say that universities and colleges, who made major strides in the research that based our current agricultural system on fossil-fuel based fertilizers, have a large share of the responsibility for finding a solution."Campuses have a lot of eaters, and a lot of influence in their community. Wouldn't it be exciting if biology classes planted their own biodiversity plots? Why shouldn't edible schoolyards be on every campus?"

Given the intricacies of the global food system, it's no small demand. Shiva’s final comparison drew a laugh from the audience: “Those guys fiddling with the derivatives that put your economy into this state are like me, they juggle numbers. But wouldn’t it be amazing if they were juggling numbers that would make a better system for us?”

Podcast Interview with Vandana

Vandana Shiva: Why Shouldn't Edible Schoolyards Be On Every Campus?

We are recapping AASHE: Sustainability on Campus and Beyond as it happens. If you were at the sessions we're covering, weigh in with your comments below. Or see others' blogs, photos and Twitter updates on the AASHE live page.

A quick scan through your house reveals a few truths about the energy costs of your appliances. In many homes, the most constant energy drain comes from the direction of the kitchen, where the fridge is on all the time, and gas ranges, toasters, mixers, blenders and waffle-makers await the flip of a switch. And that's before we talk about the carbon emissions inherent in the food itself!

On the commercial scale, this energy cost multiplies exponentially, as restaurants and cafeterias operate at peak output for sometimes 18 hours a day or more. A single commercial refrigerator may require as much energy as an entire household, and according to the Green Restaurants Association, professional kitchens use five times more electricity than other commercial industries, such as lodging or retail.

So, to address the carbon costs of food preparation, Kendall College has teamed up with the Green Restaurants Association to work towards greener, more energy-efficient food preparation. Kendall College, based in Chicago, is the first culinary school to operate a certified green restaurant, and has two on campus.

As part of their outreach efforts, Kendall and the Green Restaurant Association have produced "Sustainability for the Foodservice Industry," a short video which highlights steps that commercial and campus kitchens can take to be more environmentally responsible and save costs. Kendall has made the usual switches, such as CFL lighting, Energy Star appliances, and composting food waste, and is also experimenting with policies that affect diner's choices, such as only serving water upon request, which could potentially save millions of gallons of water per year.

To learn more, check out the free video here.

Image: FreeFoto.com

Several posts over at the Buildings & Grounds blog have caught our eye recently for their focus on environmental initiatives on campus. Part of The Chronicle of Higher Education's site, this frequently-updated blog covers architecture, design, new technologies and construction, landscaping, and of course, sustainability.  (Full disclosure: I was May's guest blogger, so a couple of these posts are from me.) Check them out below:

Organic Gardening at Furman University : James Wilkins, sustainability coordinator at Furman, guides the Chronicle through a small garden designed to teach students about sustainable agriculture.

Conserving Water at Emory University: Emory's new rainwater collecting system is controversial enough that city planners have required that the water be dyed blue.

Tweaking Won't Assure Sustainability, But Reimagining Might: One of my guest posts takes a closer look at ASU's Biodesign Institute.

Education Is the Ultimate Carbon-Neutral Solution: This post from Clean Air--Cool Planet's Anne Stephenson examines the role of universities in creating aware, environmentally-educated citizens.

Save Energy or the Bear Gets It: A student project at Dartmouth encourages energy conservation with a real-time monitor of electricity usage in the dorms. Residents team up to keep the bear off "thin ice!"

Should a Liberal Education Include an Agricultural Education?: Teaching students about agriculture is another way to teach them about the world and their unique place in it.

Time to Roll Up Our Sleeves: My final post addresses the nature of symbols within the environmental movement, and a new way of thinking about sustainability.

Part of what makes campuses so energy-intensive is the fact that a lot more goes on than classes. Many students reside in dorms, which means they spend the majority of their day working, eating, studying, playing and sleeping on campus. Faculty and administrators (as well as off-campus students) often work long hours, and use university resources like cafeterias or bookstores before commuting home at the end of the day. Colleges must provide all kinds of amenities to their populations, and today we want to focus on a big one: the food.

While some campuses are small enough to source all their food locally, or even grow it on campus (like the organic, vegetarian meals provided by Maharishi University), for most this is impossible or unfeasible. Ohio University recently took a different approach by conducting an audit of wasted cafeteria food. This easily-measured study took place over four days in January and February, and averaged the amount of waste by dividing the amount of edible food thrown away (not including scraps like banana peels or bones) by the number of people who dined during the day.

What did the results show? On average, 5.4 ounces of edible food were thrown away per person.  On January 21st, when 248 pounds of waste were discarded by the 756 people who were served, 330 additional people could have been fed.

The University's Office of Sustainability, which conducted the study, decided to test for a few more variables. On the third audit, February 4th, all trays were removed from the cafeteria. Students could still eat as much as they wanted, but had to make more trips to load up their plates. The amount of food wasted dropped to 4.5 ounces per person. On the final audit day, February 18th, signs and charts displaying the results of the first three tests were scattered around the cafeteria in the hope that they might provoke a further decrease in food waste, even though trays were once again available. An average of 5.56 ounces per person was discarded.

What we find most interesting is the fact that education seemed to have a significantly smaller impact than the removal of the dining trays. Given the immense amount of energy  (and the financial cost to diners and the university) that goes into producing, packaging, transporting and preparing food, small changes in eating habits can make big differences in efficiency, without requiring that students give up any of that much-needed brain food!

What do you think? Should the trays be removed entirely? Or is it better to step up educational efforts and expect diners to monitor themselves? Has your campus done similar audits or had success with other strategies for managing food?

Photo credit to Flickr Suviko

The most obvious culprits of global warming are transportation and energy, but what exactly does that mean? If we all change our light bulbs and buy a hybrid the problem is solved? That certainly would help, but we have to start thinking about things that use a lot of energy. One of the biggest energy hogs is the food industry. Think about it. Farms are usually located in rural areas and the food that is grown there is planted, watered and harvested with the aid of machines. And food has to be transported by train or truck or even air to get onto local grocery shelves. That uses a lot of energy and transportation. But we need to eat, so what is the solution?

Yes, it’s that simple. According to a study conducted over 22 years by the Rodale Institutes Farm Systems organic farming increases soil carbon storage 15-28%! Organic farming also uses 37% less fossil fuels energy inputs. Buying food that is grown in your region and them making sure that it was grown organically makes a big impact. And NWF Fellows have known this for awhile.

Fellow Daniel Feinberg from the Class of 2001, started a project at Occidental College in Californiato encourage use of organic produce in the dining halls on campus. In 2004, Philip Aroneanu instituted a small-scale composting system in Middlebury’s greenhouse using food waste from on-campus dining halls. The composting system produced fertilizer for campus and community organic gardening. Buying locally and buying organic are one of the healthiest ways to fight global warming. So treat yourself to something organic!