Loomis Food Waste Revisited
Amy He ’25 and Yilian Jiang ’25
Christine Wu ’25
Toward the end of the 2023 school year, food waste became a noticeable problem after the dining hall started using Blue Earth Compost, a food scrap collection service. Mr. Garfield, the FLIK Dining Services Manager at Loomis, cited how the service allowed dining hall staff to track how much plate waste was produced, revealing an alarming quantity. “Those Blue Earth bins, we’re filling [one] between breakfast and lunch[...]and then for dinner it’s three-quarters, so we’re doing two bins a day, which is around ten gallons each – and that’s just plate waste,” he said. In addition to plate waste, the dining hall tracks the waste produced from meal preparation, such as discarded fruit and vegetable peels, which adds to the total recorded waste. Ultimately, food waste has begun to warrant attention from the school administration, resulting in campus-wide initiatives to increase awareness amongst the student body and promote sustainable practices.
The Earth Month Food Waste Reduction Challenge–the E-Proctor effort to encourage the community to reduce food waste during April 2023–was a program dedicated to incentivizing students to reduce food waste production through a series of prizes. During an all-school meeting on April 10th, 2023, the E-proctors announced the challenge as part of the LC Earth Week celebration. They promised that during Earth Week, with each amount of food reduced, there would be a subsequent prize for the community, with the ultimate reward being a day off if the school could reduce their food waste by half. However, these prizes did not significantly prompt the community to change their wasting habits. Eventually, the LC community earned the first prize: a special FLIK meal where the dining hall served bánh bao, a type of Vietnamese pork bun, to celebrate a 10-20% average reduction in food waste during the challenge. Yet, as time passed and the spirit of Earth Month faded, food waste at Loomis remained unsolved and gradually received less attention from the LC community.
At Loomis, a private college-preparatory institution, most students come from privileged backgrounds where their families do not have to worry about food availability. Therefore, many students can be inattentive to the amount of food left on their plates after each meal. However, many Americans and individuals living in developing countries face the challenge of food insecurity every day because they need consistent access to balanced, safe, and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and preferences (Bozsik et al., 2022). As Garfield noted, “Typically when my employees start [working at FLIK], they are shocked by the amount of food wasted …[because the mindset of] ‘I don’t like [the food], so I’m just going to throw it away’ is not an option for them.”
Fortunately, Loomis's food waste does not directly end up in landfills. As previously mentioned, the institution works with Blue Earth Compost. This local service collects food scraps from Loomis twice a week and composts them to reduce the school’s environmental impact. In addition, Garfield mentions that extra, unserved food produced in the kitchen is typically reused to make the next meal, or they are also “sometimes donated to a shelter or a soup kitchen.” However, students should not rely on these measures to eliminate the environmental consequences of their food-wasting actions. According to Garfield, the school’s food waste initiatives are mainly about changing the school culture and teaching students how to be sustainable members of the school and the larger global community. “You’re not going to go grocery shopping as an adult, buy a bunch of groceries, and get home and throw them in the garbage.”
Ultimately, changing the culture surrounding food waste is a community effort that starts with individual actions. Each member of the Loomis community should actively work to increase their awareness of the food waste situation and take steps to reduce their contributions to the problem. For example, as students return plates, they should closely examine the amount of uneaten food on the conveyor belt and observe the problem first-hand. By making a conscious effort to inform themselves, students can combat ignorance toward food waste. Additionally, while past incentives may have made some progress in reducing food waste, Mr. Garfield expressed doubt about their continuation. “Personally, I don’t feel [that] being rewarded to [reduce waste] should be the case,” he said. In addition, he cited the difficulty of accurately tracking waste with a reward system in place, as “people will just be throwing their food in a different garbage can.” Consequently, it is increasingly clear that the onus is on students to strengthen their awareness of food waste production and genuinely care about resolving its ramifications in the greater context of environmental justice and food insecurity. “When you guys go to lunch today, just look at the belt and see what’s on the plates. You’ll see full bowls of yogurt, not even touched, and that adds up; it’s a lot of stuff,” said Mr. Garfield. Confronting desensitization is the first step toward a resolution, yet it can influence changing mindsets. By educating themselves and one another, the Loomis community can promote a more sustainable and socially responsible culture on campus.
References
Bozsik, N., Cubillos, P., Bopushev Stalbek, Vasa, L., & Magda, R. (2022). Food security management in developing countries:
Influence of economic factors on their food availability and access. PLOS ONE, 17(7), e0271696–e0271696.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0271696
