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MSU CAFETERIAS: Lots of food going to waste? by Lauren Talley We’re all guilty of it and the buffet-style cafeteria doesn’t make things any easier. We take too much food and, unless we’re ravenous, we throw a good portion of it away. But what about the rest of the food –- the food that never leaves the meal line? Six tubs of pancakes, numerous pans of mashed potatoes and gravy and an endless amount of steamed vegetables. Sounds like a typical meal waiting for students in the food lines of the campus cafeterias, right? Think again, that was the amount of food that environmental biology/zoology freshman Janeen Stalder threw away after one dinner in the Akers cafeteria. “[The pancakes] were still warm,” said Stalder. “They smelled good and I would have eaten them, but I wasn’t allowed because it’s against employee policy and it’s a health code violation.” When journalism sophomore Virginia Borcherdt was a level-one cafeteria staff member last year in Wilson Hall, she saw similar waste in the cafeteria. Borcherdt said on an average night the food bins she discarded were at least half full. Borcherdt recalled an encounter she had with an international student from India. “He was a graduate student, first night on the job. He asked what we should do with the leftover food. How do we save it? I told him that we throw it away, that it can’t be saved," said Borcherdt."His reaction was one of disbelief. With what he’s experienced in India, I couldn’t even imagine the thought going through his head.“ This experience prompted Borcherdt to ask her boss why the food could not be saved. “[My boss] said it was a liability, because if someone got sick, they could sue the University,” said Borcherdt. The dining hall managers try to cut down on the waste. According to Dining Services Coordinator and Akers/Hubbard Complex Manager Matt McKune, the dining service coordinators conduct a five-week cycle at the beginning of the year where they can determine the busiest times and what food should be served when. From this, they can gauge how much food to serve, what food to serve and when to serve. “It’s not an exact science. It’s a forecast and an actual could be different,” said McKune. The cafeteria cooks use a method called “batch-cooking” to help decrease the amount of waste. Batch cooking is a process in which the cooks prepare servings of food throughout the night so that it is always fresh from the oven. “We hope to have very little leftover food if there is, we try to find ways to use the “on-hand items,” said McKune. While the dining service coordinators do all they can to reduce food waste, the problem remains.Last fall, the Department of Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering performed an audit that estimated the amount of post-consumer waste from the campus cafeterias. From a two-day study in which trays were scraped in 50-minute periods, it was determined that each student produces about one-third of a pound of waste per day. According to agricultural and biosystems engineering graduate student Dana Kirk, the department hopes to conduct an in-depth study in October to determine the total amount of the food waste, not just the amount generated by students. Currently the wasted cafeteria food is sent to the East Lansing municipal wastewater treatment plant for disposal. The Department of Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering is working towards finding new options for generating food waste into energy. |
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