At the end of each meal, students rush out of the dining hall, stopping to throw out leftover food and hurrying to whatever next commitment awaits. However, in recent weeks, some students have stopped to notice the excessive amount of food waste in the Cafeteria and have asked: “Does Lake Forest College have an eating issue?”
According to the Food Recovery Network, an organization aiming to reduce food waste across college campuses, approximately 22 million pounds of uneaten food is wasted annually by undergraduate schools, a shocking national statistic for a country that has nearly 17 percent of its inhabitants living in food-insecure households.
Unused food from the stations within the Caf are sorted and returned to storage, where they are later re-utilized. “The only food that we really throw away at the end of the day is maybe a couple pieces of pizza, some French fries, or grilled cheese,” said Micenko. “If there’s rice, noodles, mac and cheese, chicken, pork, any proteins, we can utilize it for soups or some other station. So we do utilize most of our leftovers.”
To further reduce food waste, Aramark sorts and weighs all unused food that cannot be reutilized in order to better estimate the amount of food required for future meals. Food bins containing unused materials from each station.
In recent years, Lake Forest College has been taking steps to reduce food waste on campus. According to Jason Micenko, director of food services at the College, food waste is an issue in the Cafeteria. However, this is- sue is generally student-generated. “Every day at lunch I look around at plates and I see people with tons of food and I see a lot of people not finishing it,” said Micenko.
Samuel Froiland ’16 agrees with Aramark that student waste is to blame. “The garbage can is evidence of that,” Froiland said. “I know a couple years ago, LEAP had an event where they stood there when people threw away their waste, and it was a demonstration of how much food stu- dents waste.”
Most students have not witnessed what happens once the doors of the dining hall close after each meal. in the Cafeteria are gathered and their contents weighed to determine how much food is ultimately being wasted. These materials, which cannot be reutilized in other meals or at other food stations in the Cafeteria, amount to a few vegetable scraps from meal preparation, a handful of apple cores, and shreds of cheese. Some items, like the remaining few pieces of pizza or slices of grilled cheese cannot be reused at all.
While Aramark’s efforts to reduce food waste on campus have been beneficial, there is still more that could be done. Regardless of the cause of the issue, many members of the Lake Forest College community have agreed the education of students as to the issue of food waste is the greatest method for prevention.
“As far as long-term strategies to mitigate waste on campus, I would think that students, when they come in to school, should have an environmental education introduction, in which they would talk about things like recycling (and) food waste, which are huge problems on campus,” said Froiland. “If you look at the Dumpsters, for example, a lot of students don’t realize that you can’t recycle pizza boxes if they have food waste on them. Building that kind of knowledge in the student body early on is really, I think, the long-term solution.”
According to members of the environmental studies field, there are methods than can be used to educate students. “I think there should be signage that talks about the amount of food waste,” said Glenn Adelson, Associate Professor and Chair of Environmental Studies. “I think that we should try to develop a culture where you don’t waste food.”
Grace Sullivan ’17 agrees: “Signage helps a ton, and it doesn’t have to be anything more than ‘this is what your plate should look like,’” she said. If excess food waste is an issue that is created on the consumer end, then it is also an issue that students can take part in reducing. Awareness and knowledge con- cerning this issue can help drastically with the prevention of food waste and will ultimately help in the limitation of future waste.
