Food Waste in LC’s Dining Hall
Yilian Jiang ’25
Christine Wu ’25
As an institute that prioritizes sustainability and strives to implement environmentally-conscious initiatives into every aspect of the school, Loomis has recently directed its attention toward the increased amount of food waste being thrown away from the dining hall. The school administration has repeatedly emphasized that the alarming rate of food waste production impacts the school financially, tainting the state of the dining hall, and increasing the workload of the staff. Yet, despite the increased awareness, students continue to excessively discard uneaten meals.
Keith Garfield – the manager of FLIK Dining Services at Loomis Chaffee – is in charge of the dining hall’s processes, including coordinating recipes, ordering meal ingredients, and overseeing kitchen staff tasks. He explained how staff members of the dining hall are trained to minimize the amount of kitchen waste by documenting the amount of waste produced throughout meal production. The school uses WasteNot, a waste reduction platform, to record waste from food that cannot be consumed, like vegetable peels and bones. This program allows chefs to be conscious of how much waste is being produced and the source of its production and minimizes unnecessary waste. Unserved foods are also cooled down and reused, by methods such as grinding leftover meat patties to make spaghetti sauce, to ensure that available ingredients are being utilized. These efforts to reduce food waste express the dining hall staff’s dedication towards sustainability within the greater task of feeding the school community and expose how the current food waste problem is disproportionately caused by consumer plate waste, not meal preparation procedures.
Rather than consisting of small meal leftovers, a generous amount of plate waste is primarily generated when students take excessive portions without considering whether they can finish them. According to Garfield, students are “piling on a bunch of food, taking a few bites, and then bringing [their plate] to the dish return”. On many occasions, a significant quantity of food makes its way to the dish return without being touched at all, resulting in the needless expending of several complete meals. While the waste from a single dish can seem insignificant, the numbers add up dramatically; on average, plate waste accounts for 100-150 pounds of food thrown away per meal. This term, 75 unspoiled grilled cheese sandwiches were thrown away during a single meal. On another day, 60 burgers were discarded, with no indication that they were intended to be eaten. Students are generally encouraged to start with smaller servings and finish them before returning for seconds, but these recommendations are being disregarded.
Being ignorant of plate waste production also makes the jobs of the dining hall staff more difficult and tedious. At the dish return, the kitchen personnel must dedicate a longer period to discard the considerable amount of unfinished meals, which increases their shift duration. In addition, the number of students who frequently leave their dishes and trash on the tables “causes [the] staff having to stay later to clean up after everyone”, said Garfield. Negligence towards food waste is directly correlated to staff working conditions and the augmentation of unreturned dishware in the dining hall.
At a private boarding school like Loomis, the privilege of having three meals supplied every day is often overlooked. By carelessly throwing away meals, the high-quality ingredients that the school invests in for the well-being of the students are being expended. “People are struggling these days with food being so expensive. They are starving and we’re throwing food away without thought — [stopping this] is something we have to see and be a part of,” said Garfield. Money spent on wasted meals could be allocated towards dining hall features that students are interested in, he continued, “[such as] poke bowl stations”.
To make the dining hall cleaner and mitigate waste production, the excessive amount of food waste from the dining hall must be addressed. Students should remind themselves to start with smaller servings and go back for seconds only after they have finished. Ameliorating this problem is a collective effort, and everyone must be more conscious of how their individual choices not only affect our immediate community but also contribute to the more significant state of the global food crisis.
