For many reasons, the issue of food waste in today’s world is a difficult one to tackle. The issue is very complicated, and the magnitude of the problem is very tough to nail down. However, the issue of food waste is incredibly important in a world where we see enormous inequalities between countries with regards to amounts of foods that are available. Even within countries, access to food can be vastly different for many people. As a result of the generally acknowledged inequalities of access to food, the issue of being efficient with our resources becomes a key to this issue. “How do we use the resources that we have in the most efficient way possible?” then becomes the question that we should answer.
After being on a college campus for the past few years, I have been able to observe quite a bit about the dining habits of many people including myself. I routinely see people in our dining commons grab multiple plates of food, only to eat one plate and then decide that the food on the other plate “didn’t taste good” or was “too much food to eat”. The entire plate then gets sent back on the conveyer belt and all of the food on it was wasted. It’s really alarming to see how much food people throw away simply from the lack of focus when picking out the food. This is somewhat understandable since the dining commons has many choices of food and people want to get a sample of all of the different options. However, the concerning thing is the lack of thought going into how much food a person will actually eat. It didn’t take long for me to see the amount of food that gets sent back to the kitchen and think to myself, “I wonder how much food is wasted every day” or “I wonder if what the cumulative effects would be if everyone on campus wastes food at this rate.” These are a few of the questions that spurred my interest in this topic.
One of the first things to consider when thinking about this issue is the idea of each person having an ecological footprint. The general idea of the ecological footprint is to determine how much of the earth’s energy a single person uses. The following explanation is a more specific way to describe what the ecological footprint is:
“The simplest way to define ecological footprint would be to call it the impact of human activities measured in terms of the area of biologically productive land and water required to produce the goods consumed and to assimilate the wastes generated. More simply, it is the amount of the environment necessary to produce the goods and services necessary to support a particular lifestyle. (Ecological Footprint)”
By describing the concept of the ecological footprint as the amount of environment needed to produce the goods and services to support a certain lifestyle, it follows that food plays an enormous role in this. A.R. Palmer, in his article “Ecological Footprints: Evaluating Sustainability” talks a little bit about this issue and mentions a few interesting things. First, he says that the U.S. footprint per capita is unsustainable for everyone in the world. This means that if everyone were to live the lifestyle of the average U.S. citizen, we would need more than one Earth to have the necessary resources to provide for it. He also says that Americans can only sustain our present footprint if we do it at the expense of other communities throughout the world. This is because there isn’t enough ecologically productive land on the planet for everyone to live at our standards (Palmer, 4). As a result, less of these resources are available to people from other nations. All of this information is useful; however, it is important to note that the footprint he is talking about here includes more categories than food alone. It includes food, degraded land, and wood products. If we dig deeper to look at this, we can find that food accounts for over half of the entire footprint per capita. Food in this scenario accounted for 2.57 acres per capita while the total footprint was 4.58 acres per capita (Palmer, 2). Keeping all of this in mind, it is evident that as people can be more efficient with their food consumption their ecological footprint will be lowered. This is not necessarily to say people should eat less, but rather should be more efficient in the food they choose to consume. The result of people choosing to be more efficient with what they consume is that each person needs less land or resources to sustain their lifestyle. By using less land and resources, we can have less of a negative impact on other communities throughout the world rather than living “at their expense” as mentioned in the article written by A.R. Palmer. For this reason, the topic of ecological footprints is very important to keep in mind when discussing food waste.
After discussing why addressing food waste can be important in today’s world, it is also important to know why people at the Taylor University Dining Commons might be wasting so much food. There are numerous plausible explanations for this, with the first reason being that people don’t really think about how much food they are wasting. With all of the different options in the D.C. it is very common to see people grab two or three plates at the same meal. An example could be somebody grabbing a plate from the burger line and a plate from the Mexican line and then grabbing a small salad on top of that. Many times, people will grab their food in numerous trips before they even sit down to eat it. This causes people to serve themselves a lot of food without even realizing the exact amount of food they are taking. The result is that a lot of people take more food than they can eat, and they waste a large majority of it. I think that this can be attributed to a general lack of focus or awareness. Many people probably don’t even realize that what they are doing can come with some unintentional consequences.
Another reason that people don’t eat all of their food is the issue of inconsistency in taste. When the cafeteria is making food for so many people, there are going to be some reasonable inconsistencies. For example, on some days the chicken will be popular and on some days people won’t like the chicken as much. It is really not possible to have perfect consistency in taste, texture, and those types of things. Really, most of it comes back to taste. If people do not like the taste of the food that they have taken in the Dining Commons, then there will naturally be some extra food waste when they choose not to eat all of it. This is definitely a factor that plays into the amount of food waste in the Dining Commons.
Yet another reason that people waste food is that students are not allowed to get the portions themselves in some of the lines. Examples include the Mexican line and the burger line, and at certain times throughout the week this extends to another section in the back. The problem with having employees serve the food to the students is that at times the workers who serve the food end up giving out much more food than the student wanted to eat. Obviously, this leads to a significant amount of food waste and the issue is not really something that the students can control.
Looking at some of these potential reasons that people waste food in a cafeteria setting can give us more of an understanding when looking at the amount of food that gets wasted. The statistics of food waste world-wide are shocking. In 2008, a report by the Stockholm International Water Institute reported that food wastage and losses could be as high as 50% globally. A separate study from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers found that of the 4.4 billion tons of food produced each year, 1.3 billion to 2.2 billion tons of the produced food is not consumed by humans (Walls, Finn, & O’Donnell, 2014). These statistics can give us an idea of how big of an issue this is globally, as we can see the proportions of food production that doesn’t get used. We can see that this number is projected at around 50% from a few different studies. Taking this into account, we can then narrow the focus to look at the statistics of food waste at universities specifically. According to the Food Recovery Network, there is more than 22 million pounds of uneaten food every year on college campuses alone in the United States. Recycling Works, a Massachusetts recycling assistance program, estimates that a single college student, on average, will generate 142 pounds of food waste each year (How to Reduce Campus Food Waste). The amount of food waste estimated by these studies is staggering. When the average college student is wasting close to their body weight in food, there is certainly room for improvement. It’s easy to see that the issue of food waste is a global problem, and that college campuses should do their part to minimize the problem.
With the apparent need to reduce food waste on college campuses, one of the first solutions to think about would be to eliminate one of the primary causes of waste on campus. In this case, making an attempt to reduce the amount of food that is taken but remains uneaten is a great place to start. The Environmental Protection Agency recommends that buffet style dining services encourage customers to only take what they will eat (How to Prevent Wasted Food…) As discussed earlier in the paper, one of the main causes of food waste is people taking more food than they will eat. By encouraging customers to follow through, it at least gets them to think about the issue rather than being oblivious to what they could be doing. Regina Northouse, executive director of the Food Recovery Network, says that increasing awareness with both university administration and students is a key factor in initiating change. She says,
“Let’s not be embarrassed by our food waste. If we can all be honest about it, that means we have identified the problem, and now we can insert solutions to that. (How to Reduce Campus Food Waste)”
Another thing that is recommended by the EPA is for dining halls to go tray-less with the hopes that students will take less food if they don’t have a tray to load more than one plate on. There are numerous benefits to preventing wasted food through this type of source reduction. One benefit is the prevention of pollution that comes from food production, since fertilizers and pesticides are generally used to grow the food that the cafeteria will produce. Energy will also be saved by not having to grow, prepare, and transport the excess or wasted food that was saved. Other benefits include saving money by only buying what is needed, saving on disposal costs, and saving on labor costs (How to Prevent Wasted Food…) Attempting to eliminate the amount of food that gets taken but uneaten has numerous benefits, and is one of the best ways that college campuses can begin to tackle this problem.
Another practical way to be more efficient with the food that is produced is to give some of the left-over food to people who can use it. In other words, when a college cafeteria has a surplus of food that is going to expire in the near future, they would donate the food to a shelter or organization who can distribute it. In 2015, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated that approximately 13 percent of households in America had a hard time with providing the necessary food for their entire family. These are the people who would benefit from the donation of surplus food. On top of being able to feed people, other benefits of donating food include supporting the local community and saving money by avoiding storage and disposal costs. There are also tax benefits to be claimed by donating food (Reduce Wasted Food by Feeding Hungry People). Being able to help other people with these types of donations not only helps families put food on the table, but comes along with various financial benefits as well.
For the surplus food that may not be able to make it to a shelter for human consumption, this food could go towards animal feed. There are multiple benefits to this that are shared by all parties. The EPA says that farmers have been using food scraps as animal feed for centuries. The food scraps will save both the farmers and the donors money because it can be cheaper for the donor to allow a farmer to take the food, rather than pay to have it shipped off to a landfill (Reduce Wasted Food by Feeding Animals). The farmer is then able to save money by not having to buy feed for the animals. Something very similar to this has been implemented at Rutgers University. Rutgers has the third largest dining operation in the whole country. Every year, their facilities serve over 3.3 million meals and also cater for more than 5,000 events. Rutgers has been donating food since the 1960’s, and their answer to the problem of food waste is primarily to donate the food scraps to local farmers to use as feed for the animals. To begin their process, the staff scrapes food from the dishes into a trough after every meal. The food and napkins then move into a pulper, where the scraps get pulverized. The scraps get reduced in volume as the water is withdrawn in this process. This waste is then refrigerated in barrels until the local farmer is able to come in and haul away the food. The local farmer is able to feed approximately 1.125 tons of food per day to his hogs and cattle. The farmer charges half the rate that a company would charge Rutgers to haul the trash to a landfill, as Rutgers pays him $30 rather than $60. In just one year of this program, the university was able to save over $100,000 in hauling costs (Feeding Animals…) All in all, this program at Rutgers is a great example of how a system like this can be of such an important benefit to many different parties. Being able to reuse all of this excess food certainly provides many financial as well as ecological benefits.
Yet another way to use extra food in a productive way is to use it for industrial purposes. In order to convert the food to material that can be used for industrial purposes, a process called anaerobic digestion is necessary. This is a process where organic materials get broken down by microorganisms. For this to work, the material cannot have any exposure to oxygen. Food scraps, manure, and sewage sludge are materials that can be used for this process. When the process is complete, the end result is the production of biogas and soil amendment. The biogas can then be used to power engines, produce mechanical power, produce heat, produce electricity, fuel boilers or furnaces, run alternative-fuel vehicles, or supply homes and businesses with gas (Industrial Uses for Wasted Food). Programs that use anaerobic digestion have already been in place at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, among others. At Wisconsin-Oshkosh, they have partnered with the City of Oshkosh to use yard waste from the city along with food waste generated on campus that gets turned into energy. The digestion process that they have produces up to 10% of the energy needs for the campus (Industrial Uses for Wasted Food). Providing around 10% of the power for a 13,500 student campus is no small feat, and it shows that anaerobic digestion is a viable option for food waste.
One final option for food recovery is through composting. Extra food that does not have other uses can be used to replenish and nourish the soil. This increases the soil quality which then helps the next generations of crops to grow. To create compost, organic wastes (food in this case) are combined with bulking agents, like wood chips, to expedite the process of the materials breaking down. The finished material then will stabilize and mature through a process called curing, and the compost is ready to use. Benefits to using compost include a reduction in the production of methane, eliminating the need for fertilizers, having a higher yield for agricultural crops, aiding in reforestation, providing cost savings over conventional soil, and enhancing water retention in the soil (Reducing the Impact…) Middlebury College in Vermont has implemented a composting program that showcases how this could be practical for a university. Over 90% of the food waste at the college is able to be turned into compost. Annually, this turns out to be around 1,500 cubic yards of compost! Essentially, dining room employees verifies exactly which plate waste gets put into the pulper. Then a truck comes every day to take away the material and take it to the composting area. The material then gets mixed with horse manure and wood chips to finalize the composting process. In 2011, the college was able to avoid $101,475 in landfill fees by composting over 370 tons of food waste and by recycling over 441 tons of other materials (Sustainable Food Management in Action). Being able to save money from landfill fees alone should make the option an attractive one for a university. With all of the other environmental benefits factored in, composting should be a very viable option for reducing food waste in the Dining Commons.
Putting all of this into perspective, it is very important for the average college student dining in the D.C. to see and understand how big of an issue their footprint can be. It is something to be aware of since the U.S. footprint per capita is not sustainable for everyone in the world. With this in mind, eliminating the amount of food waste is something each student could and should do by simply taking appropriate portions of food. The Dining Commons could also make an attempt to donate any food they can, if that food is not going to be eaten by Taylor students and is going to perish soon. This food would help many families put food on the table. For the food waste not fit for human consumption, this could be used for animal feed, for industrial uses, or for composting. Any of these three methods are legitimate ways to use the food rather than waste it. There are a significant number of ways to reduce food waste, and it is important for those of us at the university to make our best effort to achieving this goal.