My New Year’s Resolution? Ditch Dining Hall To-Go Boxes

When people ask me what the biggest difference is coming back to Harvard as a residential tutor five years after graduating, my unironic answer is the to-go containers in the dining hall.

At first blush, part of me is jealous! Back in my day, we had to stuff food into paper cups if we wanted to avoid the awkwardness of sitting alone or save time by eating on the go.

The more I think about it, though, the more I miss the to-go-less days. I worry that some of the convenience of to-go containers comes at the cost of community and connection. Anecdotally, I see the same number of students in the servery but fewer students in the dining hall itself.

A Wall Street Journal article from April reported that more students are skirting dining halls and eating in their rooms on campuses across the country. Perhaps uncoincidentally, it also noted that students are lonelier and more stressed than ever.

The connection between eating alone in your room and mental health outcomes may just be correlation. Yet I would argue that getting an extra 30 minutes per day at our desks by working through meals probably isn’t making us more relaxed. In fact, research has found that lunch breaks can improve both quality of life and productivity.

Moreover, I truly think House culture suffers when we neglect our primary communal gathering spot: the dining hall. Philosophers for centuries – from Plato and Epicurus’ dinner parties to Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas’ public sphere – have talked about the importance of eating in communion and communal gathering. This is not just a dead white guy hot take: Cultures across the world note the value of connecting with people over food.

As someone who works in a profession which has nothing to do with my concentration, the hours I spent in the Winthrop House dining hall probably advanced my personal and professional life more than my classes. The connections I made with non-blockmate housemates led to couches to crash on, job referrals, future roommates, and friendships that have lasted well past graduation.

This is not a call to schedule more dining hall meals — dining hall dates are great, but Harvard students tend to already be overbooked.

Rather, I hope that more students will spend time in the dining hall even when they don’t have plans. They might organically connect with housemate acquaintances or even engage in Annenberg-style eating with strangers.

As someone who’s naturally a bit shy, I know that the idea of sitting next to someone you don’t know can be intimidating. Just showing up in a communal space, though, can be a first step. My sophomore fall, I ate many meals alone — I found it was important for my mental health to get away from my desk and be around people for an hour a day, even if I wasn’t actively engaging with them. Eventually, people who I tangentially knew started sitting with me; these same people turned into lifelong friends.

One student told me last fall that their goal for the semester was to spend an entire lunch in the dining hall, with no laptop or phone, just watching as people came and went. When they did, they were floored. It was almost as if they had gained a new skill, where they were allowed to simply exist in communal spaces without having to seem busy.

I hope more students follow suit this semester. Maybe you sit with acquaintances you’d like to know better or eat one device-less meal per week. It’s a small thing, for sure, but I have hope that if enough people come together with similar attitudes, we’ll all feel a little less stress and a little more belonging in our house communities.

Personally, next time I get the urge to scamper back to my room with my food in a to-go box — whether it be because I’m anxious about an assignment or because I don’t see anybody I know — my goal is to resist that urge, grab a tray, and find somewhere to eat in the dining hall. I hope to see you there then, too.

Theo C. Lebryk ’19, a former Crimson News Editor, is a resident tutor in Winthrop House and a First Year SM student in Data Science at the John A. Paulson School Of Engineering And Applied Sciences.