There are many different facets of being an environmentally aware campus, and awareness of food waste is one of these. I know that most of the campus groans when they bring their dishes up only to find the conveyer belt blocked off and people taking their plates and scraping the remaining food into tubs. A food audit is coming this month, but instead of viewing it as an occasion to dread, I invite everyone to view it as an occasion to reflect on their personal impact on the environment.
What is a food audit? Food audits occur at least once a semester, when members of Greenhouse Club team up with Campus Dining to scrape plates and weigh the amount of food waste that builds up after one meal at Lowry. It usually happens on a Thursday at dinner in order to maintain some consistency with data. However, beyond just comparing the amounts of waste to that of previous months, the greater purpose of the food audit is to raise awareness of how much food waste each individual creates and how this contributes to a campus wide food waste problem, as well as to serve as a motivation for people to generate less waste.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, about one third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year is wasted. This adds up to approximately 1.3 billion tons of food waste annually. A 2016 article from The Washington Post pointed out that for the year 2007, the global carbon footprint of wasted food was about 3.3 billion tons of CO2 equivalents, or seven percent of all global emissions based on a report from the FAO.
One of the great parts about Wooster is how environmentally conscious the campus already is. A food audit can add to this environmental consciousness. The hope is that this experience will motivate people to think about their personal impact on the environment and food waste in the future, not just on the days of the audit. If individuals understand how much food they waste, then it is possible to change the amount of waste this campus produces, allowing Campus Dining to reduce the amount of food purchased and lowering C.O.W.’s carbon footprint.
We live in a world where we can no longer be ignorant of our personal impact upon the environment and where we must consider the steps that we can take today in order to have a sustainable future. Each person can have a positive influence upon the environment as an individual, and one of the ways this can be done is to reduce food waste. Please use this coming food audit to reflect on your personal contribution to creating a more sustainable future.
Claire Montgomery, a Contributing Writer for the Voice, can be reached for comment at CMontgomery20@wooster.edu.