This post contains the immortal phrase "enabling trays". Apparently these inanimate plastic food carrying devices are now being hailed responsible for those additional fresher pounds.
“A portrait of Henry VIII hangs in the Tudor dining hall at Oxford's Christ Church College (a stand-in for Hogwarts in the Harry Potter films, by the way), which the famously large King founded in 1532. We may never know why Henry had so many wives, but his obesity is almost surely the result of never having to get up from the dining table. While university students don't have servants to feed them, they do have cafeteria trays, which allow them to pile on the pork as they proceed to pork up. But The Washington Post reports that Virginia Tech, whose new dining hall is filled with gourmet treats like Belgian waffles and brick-oven pizza, has now banned the enabling trays in an effort to cut down on the eyes-bigger-than-the-stomach syndrome.”