By: Michele Cantos, PR Intern
Our first time at a Syracuse University dining hall, my younger brother and I grabbed a tray each and piled on mounds of food from every section. If I recall correctly, his tray had at least four different types of pizza, cookies, French fries and a large bowl of ice cream. While my plate was much healthier, I also fell for the allure of the buffet style setup and grabbed multiple plates of food. We served ourselves too much food and, as you can imagine, neither of us finished everything on our tray.
Now, what you can’t even begin to imagine (trust me) is the embarrassing lecture from our Ecuadorian parents (all in Español) about not wasting food because there are so many starving children back in Ecuador, or something to that effect. If you take out the part about starving Ecuadorian children, I think most of our parents have pulled a “you-are-so-spoiled” or “you-don’t-appreciate-what-you-have” type of lecture on us. But, were my parent’s right? Did a couple of uneaten items of food wasted really matter?
As embarrassing as that incident might have been, their words resonate with much of what is going in our country at the moment. According to the Food Bank of Central New York, 1 in 8 Americans is food insecure, meaning that they don’t know where their next meal will come from. In the Central and Northern New York region, 42 percent of households had to choose between paying for food and paying for rent/mortgage and the Food Bank of Central New York stated that it served 23,000 meals every day. As food pantries and soup kitchens in the area filled up with people seeking meals, my brother and I threw out almost untouched meals.
Last Friday, the Syracuse University Sustainability Division conducted a food waste audit at Shaw Dinning Center. Food waste from students’ trays, destined for composting, was collected throughout the day and put on display for students to see the volume of food waste generated at dining halls. The display consisted of three separate piles of waste, the first was for food scraps, the second for food peels (rinds) and the third was a pile of untouched foods. The first two piles of wasted food seemed relatively “normal.” However, the third pile had at least sixteen egg/vegetable rolls, four pizza slices, whole veggies and fruits, a countless amount of fries and a variety of other foods that students had put on their food trays, took one or two bites out of and then disposed of.
We’ve all been there and we’ve all done it. For one reason or another we throw out perfectly good food. We need to curb our bad habits and to take simple measures to prevent this waste. You can avoid food waste at our dining halls by taste-testing food before taking large amounts of it, taking less food at a time and returning for seconds if you want more, saving left overs, or sharing your untouched item with a friend.