The epidemic of food waste in campus dining halls
If I were to ask what pops up when you Google “the world’s dumbest problem?” would you guess the top response is “food waste?” If so, bingo! You're dead on!
Regrettably, no matter which of the three dining halls you go to on SUNY Geneseo’s campus, you will see extreme disregard for food. More often than not, there are heaps of food piled high in the waste bins. As Letchworth, Red Jacket, and Mary Jemison dining halls offer all-you-can-eat buffets, many students load their plates up to make sure that they get their money's worth. Once they're full, though, they just throw away what they can't finish. Indeed, as the adage goes, “one's eyes are bigger than one's stomach.”
The solution is quite straightforward, however; students should only serve themselves an amount they know they can reasonably finish. Should they be unable to finish their meal, they should pack it up and enjoy the rest later. If they notice this happening frequently, though, they can consider scaling down portion sizes as well.
While the Campus Auxiliary Services’ (CAS) staff cannot prevent students from serving themselves excess food, there is credit due to them for still chipping in to cut down on food waste. An excerpt from a page on the college's website titled “Sustainability at CAS,” which highlights the initiatives implemented by CAS in this regard states, “CAS composts all food scraps from the Culinary Support Center in Letchworth where all of the grab-and-go salad items throughout campus are produced. We also collect the post-consumer compostable material at Red Jacket, Letchworth, and Mary Jemison which is picked up by our partners at Impact Earth. Red Jacket has a machine that ‘digests’ the food waste and grinds these scraps into a compostable pulp.”
While these composting initiatives are worth appreciating, the primary goal should always be to prevent food waste in the first place rather than relying on composting as a solution for wasted food. The underlying problem, nonetheless, remains: why are students so careless and wasteful with their food? The psychology behind wasting food, as per professor and faculty lead at The Ohio State University's Food Waste Collaborative Brian Roe, is that people don't care as much about reducing food waste if they don't think it causes any problems. Jill Horst, Executive Director of UC Santa Barbara's Campus Dining, contends that the larger plate sizes reinforce the idea that a person must 'load it up with food' which then contributes to the amount of food that goes to waste.
Whatever the reason, I think it should be expected for college students to realize the far-reaching implications of wasting food and how each morsel of food is something many in this country would consider a luxury. According to an article written by Susan Caminiti on CNBC, “42 million people are suffering from hunger;” around one in seven Americans go to bed hungry every night. The next time you throw food away, just think about that!
Thumbnail photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons