Students report inconsistent dining hall to-go box policies
Following pandemic-related policy changes regarding takeout dining hall meals, to-go box access remains uncertain.
Lucas Holter, Senior Photographer
Amid rising cases of COVID-19, some non-quarantining students are struggling to obtain to-go boxes from residential dining halls.
Yale’s public health policies require students in isolation with COVID-19, as well as their suitemates, to take their meals to-go from dining halls and eat in isolation. Although the policy does not preclude non-isolating students from using to-go boxes, some, like Laura Dragusha ’27, have recently experienced difficulties grabbing meals on the go.
Dragusha said that when she asked for a to-go box in the Silliman College dining hall on Thursday, Sept. 7, a dining hall employee told her that she was “technically not allowed to get a box because they were for students in quarantine.”
In an interview with the News, Dragusha described feeling confused by inaccurate information listed on the Yale Hospitality website, which states that dining halls will provide students with containers upon request. As part of campus-wide sustainability efforts to reduce single-use containers, the policy aims to encourage students to eat in dining halls instead of taking their food out, per Yale Hospitality.
However, Dragusha told the News that dining hall staff proved lenient: She was permitted a box to eat on her way to class just for that day, although she was told she would not receive one the next time.
“The current policy is that to-go boxes remain available when asked for or needed,” Stacey Hepburn-James, interim senior director of residential operations, wrote in an email to the News.
Yalies have also expressed concern regarding an additional step sometimes required to obtain a to-go box. Some students told the News that after requesting a container from a dining-hall worker, students may be told to first collect their food on a ceramic plate. Then, they must return to the dining-hall entrance with their full plate, where they can transfer their food into a to-go box under the supervision of dining-hall staff.
Ghazaleh Nozary ’27 explained that she typically tries to take her food to go when she “need[s] to be in and out really quickly” and that it was fairly time-consuming to complete this additional step when she could just “take [the food], put it in the box and then … run out.”
While acknowledging that the extra step is small, Nozary reported finding it “a little more difficult” to bring her plate back and forth between different areas of the dining hall when she was short for time.
Daheun Oh ’25 shared his concern for the dining-hall staff, mentioning that it seemed “more inconvenient for the dishwashers” to clean the extra plates used in the process.
Some dining-hall staff, though, seem willing to turn a blind eye, simply handing boxes to students rather than instructing them to collect food on a plate first. Vinay Pendri ’27 commented that he was instructed differently based on the worker he was talking to.
“Sometimes,” he told the News, “they tell me to get a plate first, but some people also just give me the box to put food into. I think it really varies depending on the person at the desk.”
Yale boasts 14 dining halls — one for each of its residential colleges.