An extra banana here. A fork and knife there. There is a significant loss of either food or silverware every day at the cafeteria, according to dining officials. This loss results in thousands upon thousands of dollars lost.
"This year alone, I'll spend $60,000 in china," Charlie Soechtig, the Resident Manager at the dining hall, said. "That's just flatware, plates, cups, bowls physically lost. It's unbreakable stuff; it doesn't get lost to breakage, it gets lost to waste."
"There could be a portion that is thrown out," added Mike Pickett, the Guest Services Manager.
"When we used to have the garbage cans where people were scraping we found plates and bowls in the waste basket," Pickett said.
But the major cause of loss for the dining hall is the students who are walking out with food as well as plates, bowls and silverware as they return to their rooms.
The dining hall serves close to 500,000 meals a year and a percentage of those meals someone takes something out of the dining hall, which is not included in the meal plan.
"I would say three percent of sales is lost to people walking out with food from the dining hall to consume at other times, a piece of fruit, a bagel, a sandwich, I've seen loafs of bread, dozens of china in the backpack," said Soechtig.
"It ultimately raises the price of the meal plan, the parents get upset. 'Why is it going up?' So we try and control it somehow," Pickett said.
The steps that the dining hall administration has taken have included portion controls to limit the number of portions one student can take at a time, but that does not mean that the dining hall is not allowing students to eat as much as they want. The management just wants to cut down on the waste that is created by students taking too many portions and throwing out the uneaten leftovers.
"There is a huge amount of waste, you look at the thousands and thousands of meals we serve out of here a year, if you put 3% of that, it is a huge number of people that we could be feeding, whether it be The Lunchbox Program here in Poughkeepsie, savings in dollar amounts or feeding the needy," Soechtig said. "It's a huge amount of food that could be going to another source."
"If that three percent figure is accurate, you could feed 12,000 people," said Soechtig.
"Come in and eat whatever you want but don't come in and waste it," said Pickett. "Even with the portion control people say, 'What? Can't we get two or three?' You watch over the years with the stuff that is left on the tables, it's a lot of food. Come back ten times if you want, just don't waste it"
Soechtig said he gives what he calls is his 60 second lecture to students when he catches them taking excess food from the dining hall.
"We are in an educational environment," Soechtig says. "It's completely inappropriate behavior, the cost is absorbed by the bigger community, there [are] hungry people in our own backyard and people should realize that they should not take things that they are not entitled too, that they should put it back and don't do it again, next time I'll call security."
Pickett continued, "We try to handle it in house and not getting security or not getting the school.most kids wouldn't do it outside in a restaurant."
The dining hall's main concern is getting the silverware and such back. "At the end of the year we do an amnesty, bring your stuff back, we even go as far as bringing back ten dollars worth of silverware and I'll give you a dollar worth of credit into one of the retail environment's, because that still saves me nine dollars. We have a lot of different avenues to get the stuff to come back. The stuff that never comes back is the stuff that's lost," says Soechtig.
Freshman Allison Watson said she does not plan on returning any of the cups, bowls, or silverware she's taken this year.
When asked about what she does with the table settings she has taken this year Allison said, "Usually we just throw it out to be perfectly honest because we're too lazy to bring it back, or we just keep using it."
Some students are better at bringing back silverware and such.
"I've taken stuff from the cafeteria," junior Chris Dascoli admitted too, "and sometimes I've brought back the silverware and sometimes I've thrown it away. But I guess a lot of people do that very same thing and that's where the problem happens."
Senior Ryan Colgan recalled when he used to take things form the cafeteria: "Especially cups and stuff like that we just used to take because we needed stuff in our rooms or like food even just because it was there, so why not?"
Cups are not the only thing that students admit to taking from the cafeteria.
"I grab an apple everyday or an extra slice of pizza when I walk out, to me it's not that big of a deal," junior Matt McDonnell said. "I'm hungry and I'm paying for the meal plan so why shouldn't I?"
Freshman Allison Watson said she shares similar sentiments.
"I'm paying for it," Watson said, "so why can't I take it? If my parents are paying for me to eat there I might as well take it and eat it later."
The main issue for Ryan Colgan is not taking food from the cafeteria, but excess waste.
"I think taking it home with you isn't as bad as wasting it, say throwing it all out because you know it's going to use anyway eventually down the road," Colgan said. "It's not like people are going to go into the garbage and start eating, you know? I mean, I think there should be more of a punishment for people throwing away all their food as opposed to people bringing it home."
According to The Daily Northwestern, Northwestern University's newspaper, students on meal plans are allowed to take out snacks, such as beverage, a piece of fruit, a bagel or an ice cream cone, but are expected to eat most of the food within the dining halls.
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