You enter Sherman and examine each food station to determine what appears the most edible. Disappointed with the selections, you grab a little of everything. “What’s the harm?” you ask yourself. As you eat your dinner, you quickly lose your appetite. With a pile of half-eaten food on your plate, you shrug your shoulders and slide your plate onto the conveyor belt. Although this is a semi-regular event for most students, how often do you consider the impacts of wasting food?

Many people do not think about the food they are wasting after a meal, especially on a college campus. It is easy to not acknowledge or think about where all the wasted food goes when plates just disappear behind the kitchen walls. This disconnect between consumers and the food industry — from production to consumption to disposal — has played a significant role in the tremendous rise in food waste. According to research conducted by Kevin D. Hall of the National Institute of Health, food waste in America has doubled in the past 40 years. Today, around 40 percent of all food made in the U.S. is wasted, translating to approximately $218 billion worth of food thrown in the trash, according to Feeding America. There are so many better ways we could be spending our money than on food that is not even getting eaten. This means that 40 percent of all food made is wasted, and yet most Americans have no idea that this is even a problem!

To a college student, the problem of food waste can seem daunting, or pointless to tackle within the confines of a single campus. This mindset among college students can likely be attributed to how students are unaware of where our food comes from and where it is then disposed. As a result of this disconnect with our food, college campuses create a substantial amount of food waste. This is exacerbated by buffet-style serving and fixed meal prices, where students feel the urge to get their money’s worth and take extra food. According to Recycling Works, the average university in the United States produces 22 million pounds of food waste, with an average of 142 pounds of waste per student each year. This means that Brandeis, with almost 6,000 undergraduate and graduate students, wastes around 852,000 pounds of food a year. This number is very large, but the student body has the potential to come together to help reduce our impact.

At Brandeis, small steps have been taken toward the responsible management of food waste. Within the past two years, the composting rate has increased from two percent of the total trash stream to nine percent, as food scraps for Lower Usdan and Sherman are brought to a local farm to be composted. This is a result of a composting program implemented during the 2015 to 2016 academic year by Campus Sustainability Coordinator Mary Fischer. These are small improvements but nonetheless have lasting impacts. However, a composting rate of nine percent is not enough, considering food waste makes up at least 20 percent of all trash generated in the United States, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Thus, a goal to increase this composting rate seems reasonable. Additionally, the dining halls at Brandeis donate the excess food not eaten by students to the local Salvation Army; this pre-consumer donation is very important. Donating uneaten food to hungry people helps both a food-waste problem and a hunger problem, both of which are dominating factors in the United States and on a global scale, as well.

In order to bring the importance of food waste back to the Brandeis campus, Students for Environmental Action (SEA) has dedicated one of its initiatives for the semester to food waste. Throughout the course of the semester, SEA has taken several steps to raise awareness about food waste within the Brandeis student body. In late March, members of SEA collaborated with an independent project, spearheaded by several students with the goal of starting conversations around food waste in the dining halls. Students collaborated with Sodexo and volunteered for two and a half hours, Monday through Friday, during the lunchtime rush in Lower Usdan. All uneaten food was collected directly from students and scraped into a bin in plain sight to be weighed each day, in order to see if trends would change throughout the week as students became more aware and thoughtful of the food they were taking — and not eating. Additionally, students who had no uneaten food to discard were given stickers reading “Clean Plate Club #eatwhatyoutake” to provoke thought about the implications of uneaten food and encourage mindful choices. Weight results showed a slight decrease in food waste per capita from Monday to Friday, with a peak on Wednesday. The average weight of food waste hovered around 0.2 lbs per person. This may not seem like much, but with thousands of students typically eating three meals per day on campus, it truly does add up.

This weighing project will be followed by an educational art program featured in the annual Leonard Bernstein Festival of the Arts later in April. Titled “Produce Positivity,” this project has the goal of raising awareness about the unnecessary waste of “ugly” fruits and vegetables. This produce is completely edible and delicious, and yet, many grocery stores refuse to sell it simply because it is not aesthetically pleasing. By displaying “ugly” produce as an art form, the Produce Positivity project hopes to raise awareness about these wasteful marketing habits.

At a school that takes pride in social justice endeavors, it is vital that students are aware of the broader implications of food waste beyond the Brandeis campus. Minimizing food waste at the source is the best and most efficient way to minimize our own waste as a student body. This can be accomplished by being mindful of the amount of food we take in the dining halls. The buffet-style serving method is efficient and convenient, but it is up to individual students to be responsible for the food they take. Through events such as Weigh the Waste, we hope to raise awareness within the student body and start conversations about this far-reaching issue. Additionally, promoting sustainable eating habits in college can lay the groundwork for lifelong habits to reduce food waste. As a result of buffet-style serving methods, Sodexo managers estimate how much food students will eat at each meal of the day, often supplying more food than necessary. Thus, by overfilling our plates, this estimation is further skewed, resulting in a tremendous amount of food waste. By taking smaller portions, these estimations will decrease the University’s overall food waste. Outside of the dining halls, students can work to decrease their food waste independently. One way this can be accomplished is by being aware of the foods one buys and stores in personal mini fridges. Unlike the dining halls, food thrown away in residence halls is not composted and as a result also contributes to the generation of food waste. By being mindful of the food you keep in your dorm rooms, this small effort can result in a large collective impact from the student body.