Divya Ramesh | Finished with not finishing

When I was in the second grade, I would invariably throw out part of my lunch every day so I could finish with my classmates and avoid being called a slowpoke. The reason behind my empty lunchbox remained my guilty secret for a long time — until my own Jiminy Cricket finally forced me to crack and tearfully apologize to my mother.

While my mom has long since forgiven me for lying to her and wasting food in 2002, a portion of my childhood guilt still remains with me. While at Hill or Commons, I serve myself in small portions and stop the kitchen staffers before they ladle generous servings of fried rice onto my plate.

The great thing about an all-you-can-eat franchise is that seconds are an option if you want them. But not many people seem to see it that way. Every day, I see entire plates of food tossed into the green compost bags at the residential dining halls.

I recently sat to eat lunch with someone who got pasta from the Expo line at Hill — what to me looks likes a perfectly sumptuous and filling plate — only to also get some pie and tomato soup as well. She tackled the soup and pie first and managed to finish both — barely. The pasta was left untouched all the way to the trash bins. Similarly, I ate dinner with someone who got veggie stir-fry from King’s Court only to tell me that the “chicken looked too gross to eat” after she sat down.

The outcome is always the same. My suggestion to box the leftovers is unheard over the loud scrape of a spoon handle pushing food into the open mouth of the compost bin. I have seen some compost bags at the end of the day with the plastic stretched and giving way and have wondered how many other full plates that green mouth has swallowed.

I know that normally, the dining hall staff doesn’t give you a takeout box without swiping your card again. The rationale is that it would encourage people to take two servings with the purpose of taking one home, essentially getting two meal swipes out of one. But in my experience, when I ask for a box to wrap what are truly small leftovers — not a second meal I got just before leaving — they’ve been happy to oblige.

I am not saying that I never use the composting bin and always have a clean plate. When I accidentally served myself vegan chili, I wound up wasting it because I am allergic to eggplant. When I couldn’t eat that last spoon of beans or that last slice of cucumber, I tossed it rather than risk feeling nauseous. But my first servings are as small as the guilt of having to waste them, and I have never had to toss an untouched plate.

Interestingly, I have realized that the rampant wastefulness of residential dining doesn’t repeat in Houston Market. At first, I attributed emptier trash bins to fewer people eating at Houston, but as the noon and 1 p.m. rush cycles that clog Houston reveal, that is not the case.

The difference between the dining halls and Houston is, unsurprisingly, a question of using cash, dining dollars or bursar in Houston. You spend $6 for a burrito and feel more accountable, a sentiment foreign to the all-you-can-eat meal swipe that becomes a question of all-you-can-waste.

Moreover, each meal served at Houston reflects a reasonably sized portion — what a person will finish in one meal. Houston does not perpetuate the eyes-are-bigger-than-your stomach problem due to financial and practical reasons.

Perhaps the all-dining-dollars meal plan for next year will resolve this issue of boundless wastage in dining halls and encourage responsible eating. But in dining halls, we need to start utilizing tasting cups and smaller serving sizes, being more careful about the amount of food that goes in our plates so that we can limit what goes out.

Composting is a good practice, but it began as a way to dispose of banana peels and vegetable skins. An untouched plate of pasta or cornmeal doesn’t belong in the green compost bin.

Divya Ramesh is a College freshman from Princeton Junction, N.J. Her email address is divyaramesh20@gmail.com. You can follow her @DivyaRamesh11. “Through My Eyes” appears every Monday.

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