Weighing College Food Waste—and How to Fix It.
“It not only happens in our homes, but also on college campuses,” says Thomas Vu (’16). “The average college student wastes about 142 pounds of food a year, and in total this translates to about 144 billion dollars of food waste a year.”
To address the issue of ignored and discarded food on college campuses, Vu completed a summer practicum with the Campus Kitchen at the University of Massachusetts Boston (CKUMB), one of The Campus Kitchens Project’s 54 chapters across the country. Each chapter collects excess food from dining halls as well as donors like grocery stores and food banks, then turns it into meals for food-insecure communities.
As part of the practicum, Vu measured the amount of food gathered by CKUMB each month, then counted how many meals were subsequently produced. In June and July, Vu found the program amassed 2,727 pounds of discarded foodstuffs, turning them into 1,615 meals. He estimates those meals went to 500 individuals per week.
Vu says food waste data from previous years have been spotty, and not always in the same units. Sodexo, the company running the dining halls at UMass Boston, doesn’t keep track of food waste, instead relying on information provided by CKUMB. Vu hopes the numbers he collected will serve as a first step toward keeping track of how much food waste this chapter turns into meals, while also monitoring how much food waste Sodexo is producing.
But providing meals “is only the short-term remedy,” Vu says. As part of his practicum, he also taught a summer course to pre-college students in UMass Boston’s Project REACH on nutrition education and community gardening.
“There needs to be a way to utilize our food supply more efficiently,” Vu says.