Due to the university’s protocol towards COVID-19 prevention, along with all the classes being online, both Sherman and Usdan closed their dining areas and became grab-and-go only in the first two weeks of school. This untraditional college dining experience concerns both the returning students and the incoming midyears who just had their first exposure to college dining. Suddenly, those students who used to find their comfort spot in the dining area were lost as new problems arose: What to eat? Where to eat?
The white plates and silver tableware disappeared, all kinds of boxes—white paper boxes for kosher, round containers for soup, plastic green boxes for everything else—came into place. There is no peak lunch and dinner time when seats are barely found, but students holding handfuls of boxes can always be spotted wandering around the campus.
According to The Brandeis Hoot’s investigation, numerous students showed dissatisfaction with the new policies of the dining halls. One of our major findings is that students are often unable to estimate how much food they would eat at one time. Chris Tian ’24 told The Hoot that he found it hard for himself to get the appropriate amount of food using the grab-and-go boxes. In the past, students could always start with one plate of food and then go back to get more as they needed. However, since students are not allowed to stay in the dining halls now, they are unable to start with a small amount of food and come back later. Tian stated that for this reason, he often grabbed more than he could actually finish and sometimes ended up in food waste.
The design of the green boxes is sometimes problematic for students. The separators inside the box sometimes do not have any effect—it is still easy to mix the sweet and salty food altogether in one container. Another phenomenon that The Hoot remarked was that people were leaving green boxes in the hallway of their dorm. Bella Doullas ’24 told the Hoot that with the heat inside the room, the boxes would smell bad so quickly that she had to leave them out of her room. However, she got notified by a passing AC one time that the boxes were not allowed to be put in the hall.
To address the concerns of the students and to eliminate possible food waste in the future, the Hoot contacted Michael Reilly, the Resident District Manager of Sodexo. According to Reilly, Sodexo has not observed an increase in food waste this semester. However, since people are eating at different spots on campus and might dump the leftover food at different locations, it also makes Sodexo harder to track food waste.
Reilly also points out that each green box can hold approximately two pounds of food, which he hopes sustains what each person needs to consume. To take care of those who might have allergies and prevent the mix of tastes, Sodexo also has different containers designated for different stations. “Students can take any foods from any of the stations and we often see students filling up their compostable container and then getting separate food from Simple Servings, our soup station,” Reilly said, “or the Kosher side of Sherman.”
Reilly’s resolution towards the smell of the green boxes inside the room is “the students should bring their used containers back to the dining halls when they are done eating and we can provide them with a token that they can use to exchange it for a clean container when needed,” and he does not suggest them to leave the boxes inside the hall.
The dining hall seating has reopened starting on Feb. 1, as in-person classes resume. Although the university announces that “seating in dining halls will be offered at reduced capacity to allow for more distancing and reduced density” and “grab-and-go is still encouraged when possible,” The Hoot will continue to observe new patterns of campus dining.
