Trays of leftover food travel to the back room of Hope Dining Hall. The food will be ground up and disposed.

Students 'are eating with their eyes,' Dining attempts to minimize waste

By: Robert Preliasco

Posted: 11/15/07

11/15/07 - Have you ever cooked a large dinner and not known what to do with the leftovers? University of Rhode Island Dining Services has the same problem every day, but it cooks dinner for thousands of people, and has found several ways to use or dispose of its leftovers.

"Leftovers are a huge deal for us," Michael McCullough, Dining Services' assistant administrator of food services said. "To be successful you really can't have too many."

McCullough said the best way to cut down on leftovers is to only cook as much food as students will want on a given day.

To accomplish this, the manager of each dining hall engages in a type of "forecasting," predicting how much of each type of food will be eaten on a given day. They use factors such as the known popularity of items, if a school break or long weekend is approaching or underway, and even that day's weather.

McCullough said that on days when the weather is inclement, especially when classes are cancelled, the dining halls see a very large number of students looking for a big meal. "We gear up on those days," he said.

Conversely, the dining hall staff knows to make less food on warm spring days, when many people will go off campus or eat outside, but to have more Smoothie ingredients on hand.

"Our goal in a perfect world is never to have anything leftover," McCullough said.

However, some leftover food is unavoidable. McCullough said that Dining Services keeps leftover food refrigerated for 72 hours. Rhode Island Health Department regulations say that leftover food can be kept for a week, but McCullough said, "We choose to play it safe and go half that time."

McCullough said that dining staff tries to utilize leftovers in another meal rather than simply serving the same item again. For example, leftover taco ingredients will be used in taco pizza. He said that the wok, pasta and pizza stations are a good way to use leftover foods. They also prevent food waste because students can choose exactly what they want.

McCullough said that wasted food is a problem for Dining Services when students take more food than they can eat and throw it away. He said that this problem is more prevalent in the fall semester, when freshman students are dazzled by the selection of food in the dining halls and take everything that looks good, rather than everything they can eat in one sitting.

"That's one of the big issues that I have, a lot of kids are eating with their eyes," McCullough said.

There is little that the university can do to prevent this kind of waste, McCullough said, because Dining Services has to cook as much food as is taken, not what is actually eaten. McCullough said that students should only take small portions of food at a time, especially of items they have not had before. If they like what they try and are still hungry, they can always return for seconds.

There has been no specific system for measuring the amount of food that students waste each day since the "weigh our waste" program that McCullough said happened five or six years ago. Student volunteers measured the amount of solid food waste in dining halls to spread awareness and encourage conservation. McCullough said the program was not continued after the students graduated.

McCullough said there is also no way to measure how much prepared food is un-served and becomes leftovers, because it varies day to day and for each type of food.

At the end of each semester, Dining Services donates all perishable leftovers to the St. James food pantry in Charlestown, which McCullough said feeds 200 families. He said St. James is not big enough to accept the volume of food that URI has to offer each semester, so the remainder goes to the Rhode Island Community Food Bank in Providence. Dining Services will also give leftover food for composting to anyone who requests it.

Today, McCullough said, Dining Services is focused on reducing the volume of garbage it produces. The new Hope Dining Hall has a Somat machine that takes all waste and processes it into a compact, odorless substance that McCullough described as being similar to oatmeal. He said that the machine could fit 25-trash-bags worth of refuse into half of a bag.

"This has really been a decent system for us," he said, adding, "The volume of trash that's reduced is pretty significant."

Due to its large size, McCullough said that a Somat machine probably could not fit into Butterfield Dining Hall, but one might be installed in the Ram's Den in the future.