Dorm food cartoon

Tuesday, October 28, 1997

Save money: finish what’s on your plate

FOOD Diner awareness key to minimizing excess waste in dorm
cafeterias

By Bryan Matsumoto

Quick, dorm residents: Where’s the one place you create the most
waste?

What’s the part of your day when you’re tossing out more stuff
than at any other time? Duh, boys and girls – if you’re anything
like all the other 6,000 on-campus residents that eat in our
beloved cafeterias, then every day you’re marching to the
conveyor-belt god and making your daily offerings of half-eaten
salad, green jello and mystery meat. Well guess what, it’s all got
to go somewhere! I’ve investigated food waste in the dining halls,
and I found out exactly what happened to all that uneaten food
after it disappears around the corner.

Here’s the "meat" of the report to make you totally lose your
appetite (and hopefully to make you think about what you put on
your tray): Students living on campus waste pound after pound of
uneaten food in the dining halls, collectively making their mark on
landfills with monstrous heaps of garbage – totally avoidable
garbage.

It seems a common delusion that once the piled-high plates round
the corner, the food magically disappears without a trace. Of
course, this thinking is directly attributable to our "disposable"
culture, where anything and everything is thrown away without
thought.

The fact of the matter is that leftovers are not transported by
conveyor belt to a black hole or bottomless pit; rather, the food
waste travels through many hands and many machines attempting to
minimize its volume, ultimately taking up valuable space in a
near-capacity landfill.

Working to change wasteful attitudes requires more than just an
educational campaign that shows the trip from leftover to landfill:
the freedom of choice given in an all-you-can-take environment must
be balanced by the mandate of responsibility to take only what you
can eat, without which the state-mandated challenge of 50 percent
waste reduction by the year 2000 will never be met, and the change
in thinking from an ignorant nation to a consciously consuming
generation will never come.

Rieber Hall’s dining commons is the newest of all the dining
halls, radically reconfigured, rebuilt and reopened in January
1997. To the delight of hungry students tired of substandard
cafeteria mush, Rieber served food that was fresher, hotter,
tastier and more pleasing to the eye than that of the other dining
halls.

Being the newest dining hall, Rieber is able to take advantage
of some newer waste management technologies that the others lack.
Rieber’s new food mulcher is all the rage.

Once Joe Bruin decides he cannot eat a single bite more, he
dumps his leftover-laden tray on the conveyor belt, and his garbage
is whisked away, never to be seen again. Our tray’s destination is
the dish room, the first of many steps along the way that diners
are unaware of. When the tray rounds the corner, workers and
heavy-duty food-chopping machinery await. First stop: the garbage
disposal.

Large items like stray Daily Bruins or whole sandwiches are
separated into their respective trash bins, then all other
biodegradable waste is dumped into the garbage disposal’s murky
stream of running water. The worker at this station tosses in the
contents of half-full glasses of fruit punch and lemonade and flips
over plates to throw in their remains: Spanish rice, a half-eaten
hamburger, two untouched cookies, a mountain of wadded-up napkins
and burger-wrappers.

All this (and more!) is washed down into the garbage disposal,
which grinds up the mess and spits it all out into the envy of all
cafeterias, the mulcher.

At this point, Rieber’s equipment is already more
environmentally sound than any in the other dining halls. Not only
does the garbage disposal system recycle its water (using 50
percent less than before), it moves the food through to a mulcher
rather than washing it down the drain like the kind of garbage
disposal at home, the same kind used in the other dining
commons.

Thus far, our leftovers have been ground up into bits in order
to condense space. The second stop, the mulcher, goes one step
further, dicing up the waste even more, then pressing out all
moisture. What results is a finely-chopped, dry,
cole-slaw-consistency mulch spewed out the back into a trash
can.

This combination of grinding and mulching shrinks the volume
down so effectively that five cans of waste can be condensed into
one.

Station No. 3 on our food’s travel itinerary: the trash
compactor.

Here, six cans a day of mulched leftovers (each weighing up to
750 pounds) meet up with other garbage from around the cafeteria at
this last chance to squeeze it all in before the dump trucks
arrive.

Every day this includes a couple cans of unmulched garbage and
25 pounds of food that didn’t make it – the bowls of leftover
lettuce that no one took or the mounds of rice that were
overcooked. Contributions from the kitchen include all sorts of
food containers ranging from milk cartons to plastic bottles.

Most of these are unrecyclable, as are the tin cans that make up
more than 10 percent of the kitchen’s waste output.

It seems odd that these tin cans that carry the cafeteria’s
tomato products, corn and kidney beans have absolutely no market
for recycling.

Cardboard goods, however, can be recycled, so all cardboard
boxes are saved and separated into a special dumpster picked up
daily by a different disposal company than the one that dumps out
the trash compactor every night.

Also recycled is all white paper used by management in the
offices – a good thing since quite a lot more paper gets used than
one would expect, for inventory, rotations and other paperwork.

While these various waste management practices effectively
address the problem of minimizing the impact of waste through
admirable compacting and recycling efforts, no attention is given
to the source of the problem which demands so much processing, time
and energy.

If students would make their choices wisely instead of wasting
so much food, there would be less waste to take care of.

A lengthy environmental audit of UCLA conducted in 1989 by Urban
Planning graduate students reinforces the logic in nipping the
problem at the bud: "Source reduction should be the top priority of
any integrated solid waste management plan. (The) concept asks the
question, "How can we decrease the amount of waste we generate?"
instead of, "What do we do with wastes after we throw them
away?"

College students often complain about having to pay so much
money for bland cafeteria food, but they are paying for the food
they eat and the food they don’t.

Every week, Rieber Dining spends $37,000 to dish out 3,300 meals
a day, says Marco Rios, dining manager. His estimate that 50
percent of the students throw away a full entree demonstrates how
alterable the situation is.

He further speculates that students collectively waste one-third
of the food they put on their trays, which means that "if students
ate wisely, we could be saving $10,000 a week." This translates to
a decrease of at least $340,000 a year in avoided food costs.

The UCLA environmental audit, conducted over eight years ago in
its thorough analysis of the university’s waste management issues,
made specific recommendations on how to successfully maintain a
recycling program on campus.

The authors’ suggestions apply just as well to anyone willing to
tackle an awareness campaign to stop food waste in the dining
halls: "Education is one of the most important elements of any
successful recycling program.

"To ensure sustained interest in the program and a high level of
participation, ongoing educational programs should be planned …
(including) classroom presentations, freshman orientations, and
(On-Campus Housing Council) and student government forums. Building
coordinators, student workers and residence hall (leaders) should
be continually updated on the progress of the program.

"The small amount of recycling occurring on campus presently has
demonstrated that people will go out of their way to recycle if
they are informed about why their actions are important and how to
do it." The same can be said for teaching people to clean their
plates.

Studies have been done, pilot projects have succeeded, benefits
from a hardly demanding change in student waste habits are
obvious.

All it takes is some action.

"Certainly they could be a little more conservative," Rios said.
"We go through twelve-thousand napkins a day!"