The following is an excerpt from To Market Magazine Winter 2016. The full article can be found at http://www.tomarketmagazine.com/stories/2017/1/27/food-waste-on-campus
Nearly a third of all food in America goes to waste and finally, in 2016, it was all over the headlines. The waste alone is cringe-worthy and embarrassing, as most of us are guilty of tossing leftovers, knowing that millions of Americans live in food-insecure homes everyday. But the tragedy doesn’t stop there. Food waste eventually makes its way from a trash bin to a large landfill, where it produces methane, a greenhouse gas and major contributor to climate change. So the food that you don’t utilize, can’t finish at dinner or has gone past the sell-by date on the supermarket shelf, eventually turns into the 30 million pounds of organic matter sitting in landfills across the country, slowly helping to raise global temperatures.
Colleges and universities feed a lot of people at once, several times a day. Most of them offer an “all you can eat” meal plan, making their dining halls ripe for waste production. But because of that ingenuity (and sometimes large endowments), New England schools are at the forefront of closing the waste gap on a scale that can make a difference. While the new legislation has pushed in the right direction, several schools are taking their own approaches to minimizing the problem.
Nicole Civita, faculty member and assistant director of the Rian Fried Center for Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems at Sterling College, developed a food conservation strategy that includes four approaches to the food waste puzzle: feeding the system, feeding the people, source reduction and creating a cultural shift.
BABSON COLLEGE AND BROWN UNIVERSITY: Feeding The System
Babson College Sustainability Manager Alexander Davis says he has been thinking about how to divert waste since 2008. When the food waste ban went into effect in Massachusetts in 2013, the Sustainability Office on Babson’s Wellesley, Massachusetts, campus rolled out a robust composting program that today is collecting two tons of waste per week and turning it into rich compost. The college partners with a trash hauling service that picks up the organic waste in dumpsters and distributes it to regional farms. This includes kitchen prep waste, leftovers and food that was never served.
Babson has a strong commitment to sustainability across its campus not only with the composting program, but additional recycling, energy and green business initiatives. Davis is working on bringing the work that’s happening within his Sustainability Office, and in many ways behind the scenes, to the forefront by integrating the concepts into the college’s curriculum.
In addition to his role at Babson, Davis is on the management team at Greener U, a Watertown, Massachusetts–based consulting firm that helps institutions plan and implement sustainable systems from composting to energy and design.
Greener U helped Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, launch a composting program in the summer of 2016 that mirrors Babson’s in several ways. Jessica Barry, sustainability manager at Brown, explains that the university’s goal is to reach 50% waste diversion by 2020. “It’s an aggressive goal, but doable,” she says. By conducting a waste audit, Barry determined that the university could divert 600 tons of organic waste per year that comes out of its six main dining halls.
Brown partners with the Compost Plant, a young Rhode Island company that is taking a leading role in food waste reduction in the Ocean State. The Compost Plant contracts with many schools, businesses, restaurants and festivals on food scrap collection, all of which is taken to Earth Care Farm in Charlestown, Rhode Island, and turned into high-quality compost. The organic material is then redistributed through the Compost Plant’s delivery service.
“We turn food scraps into compost and soil blends that help gardeners and farmers grow more local food. We believe more local food means healthier communities… and we believe it all starts with healthy soil,” says Leo Pollock, co-founder of the Compost Plant.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY: Feed The People
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University’s food waste recovery program narrows its focus on feeding hungry individuals and families in the Boston area. This effort was spearheaded in 2014 by a partnership between the Harvard Dining Service; Food For Free, a Cambridge-based food recovery organization; and the national Food Donation Connection. “Both organizations provided a pivotal link in our food waste reduction efforts,” says Crista Martin, Harvard’s director of Strategies, Initiatives and Communications.
Several times a week Food For Free collects leftover food at the end of service from each of Harvard’s 13 dining locations. Each food item is separated out, placed in large plastic bags, labeled, weighed, logged and frozen. These bulk items are then repackaged and portioned into nutritionally balanced frozen meals and distributed to homeless families in transition living in Boston-area hotels. A Cambridge elementary school and Somerville High School also receive these donations for their students and families in need. The for-profit Food Donation Connection donates the bags, scales and online systems.
About 2,500 pounds of quality food a day is collected from Harvard. This is supplemented by smaller donations from Tufts, MIT, Emmanuel College, Boston University and Google. “Our goal is to create a prepared food model that others can replicate, “ says Sasha Purpura, executive director of Food For Free. Today the organization’s greatest challenge is finding sufficient freezer space.
Harvard also operates two student-run homeless shelters on campus, which receive food donations from the campus dining halls.
ROGER WILLIAMS UNIVERSITY: Source Reduction
Source reduction simply means not creating waste in the first place, and Roger Williams University in Bristol, Rhode Island, is doing a great job of this. The dining service is run by Bon Appétit Management Company, a food service operator that prides itself on from-scratch, sustainable dining solutions for institutions and businesses. At the head of the operation at Roger Williams are Chef Jonathan Cambra and Café Manager Joshua Hennessy, who think about waste management daily.
In addition to composting (also through the Compost Plant twice a week) and making donations to two shelters in Middletown and Newport, Cambra and his team feel a great responsibility to repurposing and reducing their waste before it even gets out of the kitchen. As a chef-driven company, Bon Appétit draws culinary staff familiar with cooking from scratch and finding ways to utilize products to their fullest before they reach the compost bin. Each member of the kitchen staff holds a piece of the puzzle with their daily handling of food.
“When food is cooked and cooled down correctly it can be reused, and we take this very seriously,” says Cambra. “We could have someone in-house just to focus on leftover production.”
The Roger Williams philosophy is that everyone is a little bit responsible. From the food purchaser to the chefs to the students, each community member plays a role in conserving resources and limiting food waste. “It’s about how much we purchase, how much we produce and ultimately how much the students eat,” says the chef.
STERLING COLLEGE: Cultural Shift
In Northern Vermont, tiny Sterling College has been fighting food waste and integrating this learning into its land- and science-based curriculum for decades. Sterling’s size, (about 80 students on campus at once), and rural location (Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom) make the campus an ideal setting for a closed-loop dining operation.
Sterling offers five majors: ecology, environmental humanities, outdoor education, sustainable agriculture and sustainable food systems, all of which integrate fieldwork on the college farm, woodlot, kitchen and wild lands. The Sterling Farm currently grows and raises 25% of the school’s food and there is a robust linkage between farm and kitchen every day. What cannot be grown on the college farm is purchased first from local farmers, then organic distributors and lastly from conventional outlets. All food scraps are collected for compost that goes either to the soil or the pigs and everything is done in-house without the help of a food service operator.
When Sterling students line up for a meal in the dining hall there is one option to choose from. Variations are available based on dietary needs but like the family dinner table, you can’t ask for something different. Every Sunday the whole college even indulges in “leftover night,” without question.
“We are attempting to make a cultural shift teaching these things. Reducing choice and portion size, utilizing imperfect produce, canning and drying and trusting our senses over expiration dates are all part of it,” says Nicole Civita.
Each school’s approach to food waste is slightly different, coming at it from the angles of compost, hunger, resource management and cultural change. And while the efforts on a particular campus may be dominated by one approach, they each view food waste from a big-picture perspective. At the heart of this work, leaders at these colleges and universities recognize that food waste is a solvable problem and that they have a responsibility as institutions to set an example. Many of them are already going above and beyond the laws set in place and are showing that Yankee ingenuity is alive and well across New England.
