Eat Food You Want, But Don't Waste It
By Marcie Holmes
Contributing Writer

Now that the Greenhouse is up and running, we all have our complaints: it emanates pop music. It gets too warm. The food selection is poor and unpredictable (or too predictable). But then again, there are also reasons why the Greenhouse is a great temporary addition to Pomona College. As Michael Owen wrote in the September 20 issue of The Student Life, it reminds us that Pomona employs individuals for the sole sake of cleaning our plates. Before, when we upper-classmen placed our trays on the conveyor belt in Frary, the final destination of our plates was out of sight and mind. Now, we see exactly what happens to the food left uneaten on our plates. The truth is stunningly banal.

That uneaten half of a sandwich on your plate is thrown away. That large serving of the roast beef you decided you didn’t like is thrown away. That second cookie you didn’t have room for is thrown away.

Before, we may have kidded ourselves that the dining hall staff painstakingly extracted “salvageable” food from our trays and used it in the next day’s soup. It is now clear to everyone who regularly eats in the Greenhouse that the dining hall staff makes no such economies. It is also clear that the amount of uneaten food that is thrown away at any given meal reaches impressive levels.

The arguments against food waste go well beyond, “There’s a kid starving in [insert third world country] who would have eaten that.” They include economic arguments, environmental arguments, and even an argument that speaks directly to improving the quality of food served at Pomona’s dining halls. Upperclassmen who were on campus last spring may remember some of them, as a group advertised as S.A.L.V.A.G.E. (Students Advocating Lower Volume And Garbage Elimination) described them in a series of table tents in Frary and Frank Dining Halls.
Economically, wasting food represents inefficiency. According to the National Solids Waste Management Association, the United States produces over 50 billion pounds of food waste annually – that’s 185 pounds per person. The cost of processing this waste totals around one billion dollars. Sure, the money paid creates jobs in garbage-disposal-machine factories, plumbing, garbage collection, and elsewhere. But consider the money that has gone into the food that is being thrown away. As one of S.A.L.V.A.G.E.’s table tents urged, “CONSIDER AN APPLE. Nourished by water, pumped from a river, using power from Western Electric. Fertilized with fertilizer, produced by ADM. Picked by hand, by a seasonal worker. Boxed and graded. Shipped across the country. Using gas from Venezuela. By a trucker from Oregon. Driving a truck by Peterbuilt. Stored in a warehouse. Sold to Sysco. Sold to Sodexho. Driven to Frary. Put in a basket. A LOT HAS GONE INTO IT. DON’T THROW IT AWAY.”

This is where the environmental argument comes in. The production processes for most of our foodstuffs are environmentally disreputable, thanks to our industrial agricultural system.

Transporting food also taxes the environment, as most of our food is shipped from far-flung places, requiring fossil fuels. Regardless if you take issue with the practices of food production today or not, your presence in the dining hall means you have bought into the system. However, you can at least see to it that the food you take is put to good use and not thrown away.

The final argument for not wasting food is that taking only what you will eat restores a system of feedback in the dining halls. Let’s say you see a hot dish that looks rather tasty. You serve yourself a heaping spoonful, only to later find that it tastes horrible and you can’t finish it. By all means, don’t suffer through eating the whole serving for the sake of principle. But, know that the chef is not going to see that you threw away most of what you took. His feedback is seeing that full trays are taken from the kitchen to replace the empty trays in the serving area. The chefs and dining hall managers take excellent notes as to what dishes seem more popular than others. A dish that looks delicious but tastes horrible may return to the menu simply because it appeared popular.

S.A.L.V.A.G.E.’s campaign also involved surveying a large sample of students on their attitudes toward food waste in the dining halls. Funny thing: most students thought that food waste was, indeed, a problem at Pomona. But, a majority of students thought that they personally were not contributing to that problem. Perhaps the Greenhouse’s system of scraping plates in view of students will give us cause to ponder our own contributions to the problem of food waste.