Dining Services made the following announcement yesterday:
“In this year of dining transitions, one of our many goals is to be financially prudent in our operations. We can do this in many ways including guarding against both food waste and food theft. Our initial strategy for managing food theft has been to prohibit bags and backpacks from the dining halls. This has created much lively conversation and generated some degree of ill will. It was not our intent to foster ill will, but to raise awareness of the impact that food theft and waste has on you.
We are relaxing the backpack restriction for the remainder of the spring term in the hopes that the heightened awareness of the reality of food theft will continue and that our customers will respect the policy that “you can eat all you want when you’re in the dining hall, but you can’t take a second meal with you when you leave.” We will monitor levels of food theft as well as plates, cups, glasses and silverware and we reevaluate our policy at the end of spring term. We hope that this can be a permanent change.
As a reminder, these are the items that are allowed out of the cafés: one piece of hand fruit, a cookie/bar or pastry, a yogurt cone or a cup of coffee.”