Wesleyan students, Bon Appétit informs us, throw away nearly 200 pounds of food per day. In response to this problem, Bon Appétit has begun exhorting students to take only as much food as they will eat.
This attitude implies that food waste is the result of moral frailty on the part of the discarders. But what if the daily waste of 200 pounds of food were thought of not as an individual moral failure but as a failure of our food distribution system? After all, the “all-you-can-eat” system is awfully misnamed: it actually encourages students to take more than they can eat, by promoting a hoarding mentality and not charging anything extra to those who take more than they need. The obvious solution is to do away altogether with all-you-can-eat meals and instead charge for food on an à la carte, per-item basis.
Making students pay for each item of food would virtually eliminate the problem of food waste. So why does Bon Appétit perpetuate a system that encourages students to waste food, while trusting in the power of endless exhortation to counteract this systemic failure? One reason, of course, is the extra labor that ringing up each student’s meal would require. But the fundamental problem is ideological.
The U.S. environmental movement has a tendency to recast social problems as problems of individual waste. Rather than working for systemic solutions to problems of resource consumption, EON, the Sustainability Advisory Group and other groups pushing for campus sustainability have focused almost exclusively on entreating individual students to conserve resources–to an astonishingly trivial degree. The “Eco-Tips for Bathroom Use” posted on my hall implores, “Don’t use more toilet paper than necessary. Use as few squares as possible.”
This moralistic 50-simple-things-you-can-do-to-save-the-earth brand of environmentalism is, to be frank, useless. When social systems are set up in a way that encourages waste and pollution, such individual do-gooder responses not only don’t help, they distract from the systemic solutions that are necessary. The simple act of ending all-you-can-eat meals would reduce food waste much more than a semester’s worth of exhortations. Going to City Hall and demanding better public transit would be far more effective than commanding your neighbors to drive less. And a federal carbon tax would cut more greenhouse gas emissions than a thousand boycotts and consumer campaigns. If we are serious about preventing global warming–and we had better be–we need to stop retreating into impotent individual action and start changing the system.
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