As part of an ongoing effort to create healthier food options for Tufts students, Dining Services has reduced the sizes of entrées offered in dining halls in recent years.
"We think of it as ‘right sizing,' quite frankly," Director of Dining and Business Services Patti Klos said of the changes. "We attempt to have standardized portions so that they're adequate from a nutritional standpoint, but you can have one or two or however many you want."
The reduction is seen mostly in solid "muscle sized" foods, mostly meat and fish entrees, Klos said. "A chicken breast might have been a 6 oz., and now it's a 4 oz.," said Klos of the reduction. "We find that now a student will take a piece of chicken and a piece of fish."
Dining services began scaling back portion sizes with the renovations made to Dewick-MacPhie dining hall in 1995, which sectioned off the interior into an array of different food stations serving different entrées. Klos explained that the shift encouraged students to only choose one entrée.
"[The change in portions] has been an evolving process," Klos said. "We cut portion sizes then because people would pick two or three entrées that they'd eat all of. We didn't want to eliminate variety."
Julie Lampie, Dining Services' nutrition and marketing specialist, said that the move to smaller portion sizes is intended to help students as they often have a hard time determining what is a healthy amount. "Students have difficulty gauging portion sizes. Students don't have a great grasp of that," Lampie said. "We are basically trying to educate students about portion sizes."
She said that the cut in the portions of protein-heavy foods was one way to respond to students' tendency to exceed their recommended daily protein intake. Lampie said that it was not uncommon for a student to eat the recommended amount in one meal.
"Most people eat well beyond [the recommended] amount in their diet," Lampie said.
Some students are skeptical that portion reductions have much effect on student health. "The efforts are valid, but people will eat as much or as little as they want until they're full," sophomore Bryn Kass said, adding that nutrition initiatives in the dining halls should be based on the food offered rather than portion size.
"It's about what you serve, not what you eat," Kass said.
Sophomore Rafael Ramos-Meyer agreed that reducing portion size had minimal effect. "As long as the plates are the same size, people are going to keep getting the same amount of food," he said.
Though Dining Services has not cut portion size this year, Lampie said that when presented with the option to reduce entrée size, dining officials have often chosen to do so.
Both Lampie and Klos said the dining halls are currently working to incorporate more portion plate recommendations, or visual demonstrations of the portions indicated on nutrition cards for each entrée, as way to indicate the amount of a particular entrée a student should put on their plate.
"We're trying to give some practical [guidelines]," Lampie said. "We haven't been doing a very good job, but we hope to resurrect it next semester."
Senior Patrick Tonelli believes that the smaller portions could increase, rather than reduce, the amount of waste produced in the dining halls. He said it could encourage students to simply double-up on entrees when they would otherwise only take one larger portion.
"Maybe you would just get two the first time around and it'd end up being more wasteful," he said.
Klos maintains that smaller portion sizes will allow students to make healthier choices out of their meals.
"The amount of food people want to consume is fairly constant," Klos said. "You eat until you're full or satisfied, but this way you get more variety, and you can meet more of your nutritional needs. It all depends on what you choose."
