by Eva Sanchez
Every day in the University of Maryland dining halls, an abundance of food is served to students and consumed by them- reflected by the food left uneaten on their plates and left over in the dining hall once they’re finished. This waste poses environmental problems and raises the moral question about food insecurity.
According to the Sustainable UMD website, campus dining halls have eliminated all food waste by composting all of the food leftover on plates. This allows the UMD Dining Services is also reducing their methane and carbon footprint.
“When we switched to Anytime Dining in 2016, we removed 6.3 million disposable items from the campus waste stream by eliminating all single-use disposable items from the campus dining rooms,” said Allison Tjaden, assistant director of new initiatives at UMD. “With all the composting we do in our dish-rooms, this really helped to reduce the environmental impact of the dining program & campus overall.”
The UMD Dining Services have been composting since 2007. According to Tjaden, UMD students who are passionate about the environment have helped the Dining Services get to where they are now in terms of sustainable dining.
“The diner purposefully doesn’t have trash cans where people eat so that people won’t throw away their food. Once it goes on the tray back to the dishroom, all the food will go into the big yellow compost bin. At the end of the night when we are cleaning up the stations and there is leftover food, those are also thrown in compost bins. Definitely most of the food is getting composted,” said junior architecture major and former Dining Services employee, Ryan McDonald.
According to the Sustainable UMD Progress Hub, waste that is unable to be composted is sent to specific landfills that capture methane gas. These landfills also generate renewable energy through the process of gas flaring which attempts to decrease the amount of harmful gases entering the atmosphere.
The food that the University of Maryland does not serve is also saved from becoming food waste because of the UMD Food Recovery Network (FRN). Now a nationally recognized organization, the FRN began at the University of Maryland in 2010. On October 28, 2019 they reached a milestone: since their conception they have now recovered a quarter of a million pounds of food at UMD.
“With the buffet style dining that Maryland has, you just have a lot of food waste because at the end of the night you still have to have a fair bit of food left out for people to grab whatever they want. If we’re not collecting and then donating the food a lot would just be thrown away,” said recent graduate Jeremy Folsom, the former head recovery leader at the 251 North Dining Hall for the Food Recovery Network.
The Food Recovery Network is dedicated to reducing food waste and food insecurity. Volunteers go to dining halls and UMD events after hours to pack up the leftover food that was not served. The food is taken to a local church that redistributes the food to those in need and other organizations to also help redistribute.
“I was looking for an organization that was environmental based and I thought the Food Recovery Network was a good combination of helping the environment and also helping people,” said junior environmental science and policy major, and head recovery leader at the South Campus Dining Hall, Jennifer Church.
“Food waste is a huge waste environment-wise because of the amount of water, land and resources used to grow the food….We are also just trying to help people in the community as much as we can,” said Church.
Like everything else, the University of Maryland dining halls have been affected by the pandemic. Unable to operate as normal, their ways of dealing with food waste has also had to change. Since no one is allowed to eat inside the dining halls, the food must all be served as takeout, which means no leftover food on plates to compost. It is up to the students to deal with their own food waste.
“Compost collection on campus is impacted because we are not capturing all this material in the dining hall dish-rooms. We have also had to switch back to using single-use disposable packaging. Unfortunately, I believe that this results in less composting on-campus with the current requirements to meet COVID-19 safety guidelines,” said Tjaden.
The Food Action Network has also been affected by COVID and have not been able to operate for the past two semesters.
“We are fully reliant on being able to go into the diners and going into the back of their kitchen to package up this food. That is a huge public health risk because it’s a bunch of students in the cooking areas. From a public health standpoint it’s just not feasible for us to operate,” said Folsom.
The University of Maryland Dining Services has been committed to decreasing food waste in the dining halls but because of the pandemic the ability to do that has been limited.