causes of food waste in schools
This fall, students will return to school, and cafeterias across the nation will begin to serve on average 30.5 million lunches every single day. The USDA, EPA and U.S. Food and Drug Administration provide regulatory guidance and grants. WWF, Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, and nonprofit Environmental Research and Education Foundation (EREF), provide a research framework, setting up various pilot programs and getting ready to analyze results. This, along with the USDA/EPA’s Creative Solutions to Ending Food Waste, now serves as the informational backbone for American schools interested in quantifying food waste and taking strides to tackle it. Students at Meadowlark School in Erie, Colorado, prepare to sort fellow students’ cafeteria leftovers as a first step in reducing the amount of food that gets wasted every day. Photo courtesy of Laura Smith. WWF and the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) provide recommendations for change, and also work to make it happen. Too many school lunches feature poor-quality produce that’s frequently tasteless and/or the … You can paste it directly into the WYSIWYG editor of your site. The School Cafeteria Discards Assessment Project (SCrAP) was developed by the Environmental Research and Education Foundation (EREF) – in collaboration with the School Nutrition Foundation and Keep America Beautiful – to quantify both food waste and related wastes (eg. Restaurant Food Waste Facts. Be the first to hear about important new environmental stories. Other schools are playing catch-up. The complexities of NSLP’s rules, an added layer of opacity from state regulations, and a lack of consistency from district to district around how school lunches are prepared and served, means that efforts have often occurred in isolation, with individual schools or districts tackling waste on their own. However, a big fraction of this food is disposed of even before it reaches our grocery stores. In addition, several owners/operators of premises, including hotels, shopping malls and schools, are segregating their food waste and using on-site food waste treatment systems to convert the food waste into compost for landscaping purposes or water for non-potable use. K-12 schools have a special role in not only reducing, recovering, and recycling food waste on their premises but also in educating the next generation about the importance of food conservation and recovering wholesome excess food … Finding the cause of wastage The next step undertaken was to find the cause of wastage. There are many theories as to why schools produce so much food waste, but in order to really identify the root causes, we have to get our hands dirty. In the U.S., individual consumers, then restaurants, then grocery stores are the biggest culprits, says JoAnne Berkenkamp, senior advocate for the Healthy People & Thriving Communities Program at the Natural Resources Defense Coalition (NRDC). The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) (2015) reports multiple causes of food waste. Ask kids what would keep them from throwing food away and the answer is invariably, “Serve food we like.” Chase says some nutrition directors take this as evidence that they should stick with hot dogs and pizza. A tremendous amount of this food will end up in trash bins, despite the fact that the vast majority of students receiving school meals come from low-income families and rely on school foods … But little by little, “We’re looking at things in ways we didn’t before, and that will have a big impact for the entire planet.”. If fruits and vegetables are taken but not consumed, then this nutrition is directly wasted. This is e… Establish Clearly Defined Waste Bins Throughout the School. “Everybody thinks we need to reduce food waste, but nobody thinks of themselves as waste-makers,” says Davis. Other schools redistribute unopened milks and food at snack time, backpack them home, or stash them into a cooler that kids can access on the school bus. While research has shown that food wasted by children is similar to the rest of the U.S. population, there are many ways schools can reduce food waste and teach students about the impact it has on the environment and … Scratch cooking also allows schools to loop back to cafeterias-as-classrooms. The Burlington School District in Vermont allows cartons of milk — and other untouched items such as fruit and wrapped sandwiches — to be placed on share tables. She asked about user-friendly protocols for auditing plate waste; there weren’t any. How do you solve a problem like food waste? Images and other visuals are not included in this license. IFWC has since joined forces with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations to produce educational materials about food waste for school kids. Still, there was pushback against giving the food one kid didn’t want to another who did. At the beginning of your post, please attribute the writer and Ensia as the original source and link to the Ensia article. In the risk-averse environment of the school cafeteria, nutrition directors worried about running afoul of U.S. Department of Agriculture and state health department regulations, and of getting kids sick. Markets are often small, overcrowded, unsanitary, and lack proper cooling equipment. Subsequently, more food is thrown out because it’s gone bad. For example, if a cucumber has too much curvature, it is regarded as not suitable for our grocery stores and therefore is treated as garbage. It’s something we were aware of, and we wanted to incorporate our schools into building a sustainable system,” says Laura Smith, program and grants coordinator for the district’s School Food Project. You have Successfully Subscribed! Creative Commons’ Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license, 8 percent of human-generated greenhouse gas emissions, 26 percent of an NSLP-participating school’s food budget, joined forces with the Food and Agriculture Organization, Grist reports they also have the country’s only dedicated public school employee. 7) 40% of food produced in the U.S. is wasted, including 1 billion food items annually from U.S. schools, while 50 million Americans are food insecure. Explanations reported for food waste included food-related (palatability and accessibility), child-related (taste preferences and satiation) and program-related (duration, food service policies, and coordination) factors. K-12 food waste reduction is also part of a worldwide zeitgeist. The Boulder Valley School District (BVSD) in Colorado is one of nine participants in a U of A/WWF pilot program launched this past January. Food waste. Organise a food donation/Food Bank bin to donate unopened food to people in situations of social vulnerability. If everybody hates wasting food, why do we do it (and how can we stop)? Hold it back for someone who might want it.”. One of the biggest categories of waste for many schools is milk. But at schools in Boulder, scratch-cooking has yielded what Smith calls “delicious” results that have led to increases in school lunch participation as well as decreases in waste as measured by student plate-waste audits and analytics gauging it back-of-house. Reasons include losses from mold, pests, or inadequate climate control; losses from cooking; and intentional food waste. Photo courtesy of Jacqueline Froelich | Arkansas Public Media. One largely contributing factor is food waste produced from the public schools. Click for ideas on how schools can reduce food waste. Use the different subjects in school to help teach students about food waste. According to a report by the Natural Resources Defense Council ( NRDC ), 8% of all wasted food comes from institutional and foodservice settings. But also, prevailing mindsets — of students, who may “still think it’s okay to throw most of a cheeseburger in the trash,” says Berkenkamp. Fresh produce, meat, and fish spoil in hot climates due to the lack of proper transportation. K–12 schools fall way down on the list, responsible for a (roughly) estimated 1 to 2 percent, according to Berkenkamp. And as numerous sources point out, teaching kids how to save food at school is a skill they take with them to their homes and beyond, widening the impact. USDA requires that milk at least be offered at lunch and as a result, many kids wind up with an 8-ounce carton they only partly consume or never open. On-site food waste treatment. Sign up now to receive our newsletter. That means audiences around the world have ready access to stories that can — and do — help them shape a better future. Studies have found that U.S. schools waste a total of about $1.2 billion annually. They won an EPA President’s Environmental Youth Award for their efforts and sparked enthusiasm at other Boulder schools and — importantly — among kitchen staffs, PTAs, teachers, food service coordinators, and waste facilitators. In 2016, students at Douglass Elementary decided to conduct food waste audits. Among them: too-short lunch times, junk food choices at checkout, training already-strapped school staff, flimsy connections to local food suppliers, those state health department regulations. Making an effort to reduce food waste can save your operation money, increase meal consumption in the lunchroom, and help minimize your school's impact on the environment. Rather than risk running out of food, they often put out more than is actually consumed. Michigan Department of Education assistant director of health and nutrition services Phil Chase calls share tables “Food Waste Reduction 101.” One of his northwestern districts, Boyne City, has started offering bulk milk. K–12 schools across the country are taking steps to change that. UPDATED 04.17.19: The location of the Boyne City (Michigan) school district was corrected. Growing research shows steady increase in food waste throughout the globe. The foodservice provider emerges as the most significant factor in influencing the generation of food waste at schools; other relevant factors are the amount of food prepared and the serving size, the kitchen location, the food provided for the mid-morning break, the menu composition and the geographical area. Across the country, school trash cans full of edible food are the norm. (Grist reports they also have the country’s only dedicated public school employee whose sole job is to cut food waste.) Another reason why dining halls throw out food is that once it has been touched, even if only with a serving spoon, health regulations prevent it from being sent or donated to food kitchens … America wastes roughly 40 percent of its food. When kids waste food, they not only waste resources but also set patterns of behavior for life. Watching nutrition directors hustle “to get good food served” with limited resources in a state with high rates of childhood obesity and food insecurity — only to toss it in the garbage— was hard for Terry to stomach. Reducing food waste...starting from schools 20 Sep 2018 Recognizing that children and young people are the consumers that will shape the food waste scenario of the future, thus investing in their education to reduce food waste, will help in creating a culture of change, toward sustainably stemming the problem.