In his March 27 CLP “What a Waste: Why We Waste So Much Food and What You Can Do About It,” Durham-based writer Jonathan Bloom questioned why the U.S. is able to produce enough food waste to fill the Rose Bowl every day and yet have one quarter of U.S. children face food insecurity each day.
Bloom became interested in food waste during an “eye-opening experience” in the DC Central Kitchen the summer before he attended journalism school at the University of North Carolina. Food waste became the topic of his second year graduate thesis, which fed his book, American Wasteland. Bloom has now been working on the topic for eight years.
Bloom’s work hit close to home for Greenville: Greenville County has the highest number of food stamp cases in the state, and 49% of its public school students are on free lunch. Meanwhile, 67% of the county, including 41% of its children, are overweight. Bloom refers to this combination as evidence that “our system is broken,” as it faces the triple problems of waste, obesity, and hunger.
He cited five major reasons that so much food is wasted in America: food is abundant; food is cheap; we like our food to be beautiful; portion sizes are too large; and we lack food knowledge.
On a behind-the-scenes tour of the Dining Hall organized for the team-taught Environment and Society class, Ralph Macrina, Aramark chef, documented the post-meal food waste disposal process.
At the end of each day, employees weigh clear plastic buckets of production food waste such as vegetable trimmings. The weight is classified into pounds by station, as well as “back of house” or “front of house” waste. Macrina enters the pounds of waste per student on the Aramark waste management website.
The gathered waste and compost information allows Furman to compete in the national Recyclemania competition. Last year, the university ranked third in the U.S. and first for all Aramark accounts.
Bloom took the stance that such food waste, which makes up 20% of everything sent to landfills, would only cease to become an issue when a social campaign was mounted against it, similar to the ones against littering and not recycling.
“We shouldn’t waste food because it has harmful ethical, economic, and environmental consequences,” he said.
Bloom proposes a public awareness campaign of “take what you eat,” and “eat what you take.” With respect to the restaurant world, Bloom said, “we’re being put in the position to either overeat or waste food.”
However, the Dining Hall, as a buffet, puts much of the waste responsibility in students’ hands.
Amanda Mead, the Assistant Food Service Director, stated that a huge percentage of food is thrown in the wrong bin, despite the posters differentiating compost and garbage bins.
“Most of our disposables are compostables,” she said, noting that the only true trash items in the student side of the DH are the plastic straws and the waffle batter cups.
Each day, Macrina estimates, the Dining Hall produces about one big trash can of compost and one big hopper of trash, comprised mostly of packaging and consumer trash. (The day of the tour, however, the hopper was already overflowing by 2:30.)
Both Mead and Macrina state that the responsible thing to do is to reuse excess food in the dining hall.
“We do try to reuse anything that might be re-salvageable,” said Mead, explaining that one meal’s leftovers could be turned into another meal’s soup or incorporated into some other recipe. “If you think of it as money, Aramark wants us to manage those dollars.”
For food products that are still usable but do not pass Aramark’s requirements (such as expired canned goods), Furman has entered into a partnership with Loaves and Fishes, an organization which re-serves food leftovers.
However, Macrina said that charity and food donation is not the most fiscally responsible goal.
“If I have enough stuff left over to be donating to a food bank,” he said, “I’m really not doing my job.”
The dining hall employees have made their own philanthropic gestures, however. Macrina cooks at soup kitchens for Thanksgiving dinner. Over Christmas, Aramark employees assembled 10,000 bag meals to send to Africa.