Article featured in the Guelph Mercury.

It might have seemed a risky message in a room filled mostly with young people making their way through school, but a University of Guelph teacher urged conference-goers this week to rethink their approach to tipping.

Bruce McAdams, who leads the university’s Sustainable Restaurant Project, suggested tipping “promotes discrimination.”

Research suggests people of certain races and cultures tip better, men tip better than women and businesspeople tip better than families, he said. Servers know this and tailor their service to those customers from whom they are more likely to get a good tip.

McAdams said he and colleague Mike von Massow asked 50 restaurateurs if this actually happened, and all 50 confirmed they are aware of the practice.

That means, McAdams said, restaurant owners are aware some of their customers are getting better service than others.

He said tipping also leads to disparity between the earnings of wait staff and kitchen staff.

While servers can make as much as $40 per hour including tips, cooks — who generally are college-educated — make one-third as much.

Servers typically do not make a career of it, and cooks can’t afford to raise families on their meager earnings and move on, McAdams said.

“Tipping is at the root cause of the transient nature of the restaurant business,” he added.

McAdams noted tipping began in 18th Century Britain as a means of “insuring promptitude.” But while tipping has gone out of fashion in Europe, it has become a “societal norm” in North America and is generally not dependent on the quality of service received.

McAdams was one of the speakers Saturday during the one-day TEDxGuelphU conference, built around the TED — or Technology Entertainment Design — concept of sharing and spreading ideas.

Picking up on the food idea, speaker Sylvain Charlebois urged attendees to consider the importance of family farms, particularly in developing nations.

Charlebois, acting dean and professor in the college of management and economics at the University of Guelph, said in Africa 80 per cent of the poor are farmers.

But he noted six of the 10 fastest growing economies in the world are in Africa.

“Africa is actually building a decent middle class,” he said, but the challenge will be for Africans to be able to feed themselves.

If Canadians help African farmers now, Charlebois said, one day Canada might not only export food to the continent but buy from there as well.

“We need to become more Canadian, not less,” he said. “In peacekeeping we’ve actually made a difference in history. I hope we can one day do the same for food.”