Embedded Files
Our Plan:
Our Plan:
By donating food to people that are food insecure, this can help students understand the issue of food waste and how they can help to reduce their own waste. We plan to set up a food donation area in on-campus dorms and take what is donated to Replenish on Grand Valley State University's Allendale and PEW campuses or to other food pantries in the Grand Rapids area. We want to promote donations of not only nonperishable food but also food that can be frozen or refrigerated.
What is Food Waste?
What is Food Waste?
In our country alone, ⅓ of all food produced is lost or wasted (Robertson). Food waste is food intended for consumption that is discarded along the food supply chain and cannot be used. The supply chain begins and ends with basic places as farms, factories, grocery stores, restaurants, and lastly, to the consumers. Food waste can be devastating environmentally alone. Using systems thinking approach, food waste is even more of an issue when we look at it alongside the major issue in our country of food insecurity.
What is Food Justice?
What is Food Justice?
Food justice is defined as organized actions that encompass many diverse interests fighting for equality in the production, distribution, and consumption of food.
What is Food Insecurity and How Does it Affect College Students?
What is Food Insecurity and How Does it Affect College Students?
Food insecurity occurs when someone is without reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable nutritious food.
College students are already strained on time, money, and energy and it should not be a problem for any student to obtain food that will adequately fuel their learning. However, this is often not the case for students who are not able to purchase meal plans that provide enough nutritious food for them throughout the week and semester.
Food on campus is priced higher than it would be at a normal supermarket and oftentimes due to regulations, expiration dates, or excess of food ordered there are even more amounts of that food being thrown away. One in three students at Grand Valley State University are food insecure or experience some type of food insecurity and 22% of college students have low levels of food security (Arnold). Having trouble finding food or nutritious food has a huge impact on student life. If students are unable to eat properly, then it is hard to expect them to perform properly in academic and athletics.
As seen in figure 1, a survey of 3,800 students at 34 community and four years colleges across 12 states, the academic and extracurricular consequences to food insecurity can be dire (Dubick. et al). It is disheartening that so many students have trouble finding food while food waste is simultaneously an enormous issue.
Composing an Idea:
Composing an Idea:
Meeting with Sharalle Arnold, who talked to us as a representative on behalf of Replenish, got our wheels turning. Replenish is a campus resource that serves as a food pantry for students. We also dug into more research about food waste, food insecurity, and food justice in order to learn more about what they are and how they affect people all over the world. After this immersion into the problems of high food waste levels and food insecurity on campus and in many communities, our group began generating ideas of how we could take wasted food on campus and put it to better use so that less students may go hungry.
Initially, we explored the idea of creating a food waste recovery project from a dining hall on campus to battle food waste as well as food insecurity. This would have involved collecting leftovers after closing hours and packaging them as frozen meals for students that are food insecure. However, after reaching out to campus dining we learned that they are currently busy with other food waste programs already in place.
Therefore, we shifted our focus to organizing the recovery of left behind food in the dorms during move out week. Many students that live on campus leave nonperishable and perishable food items behind when moving out because they do not want to tote them back home. This provides an opportunity for a group of students to collect these items and bring them to either students or citizens that are food insecure. Our evolving ideation process landed on designing a food recovery program. Hopefully, the recovery project can then begin to pave a path of reducing food insecurity by utilizing food waste at GVSU.
Proposal:
Proposal:
At the end of the semester, many students that live in the on-campus housing leave food behind in their cupboards, fridge, or freezer. This means that there is food sitting in the unit for a short period of time until someone comes and cleans the rooms. Our plan is to collect the food that has a possibility of being left behind in on-campus dorms and put it to better use by taking it to either Replenish or another food pantry in the nearby area.
To begin our project we plan to contact one dorm, preferably one that has a kitchen, like an apartment style, about collecting the food and provide all of the residents with a time and date that the collection would take place. We would bring a cooler for perishable items and a box for items that are nonperishable. The containers would be left in the lobby of the building along with a sign so the residents know that they can drop off their food that they do not want as they leave for the summer. There could also be signs posted on bulletin boards throughout the dorm and the Resident Assistant's or the housing directors could send a building wide email informing students of the food drop off service.
After we collect the food from all of the students that are leaving campus, we plan on taking all that we can to Replenish in Kirkhof. This allows students that remain on campus who may need food, access to the resources that they need in order to maintain healthy eating habits. However, Replenish may not have enough room for the food that we want to bring to them so we also contacted a church with a food pantry that is located in Allendale. Love in the Name of Christ has provided us with some information about what they can take, and they are willing to take some freezer items along with nonperishable items that are not expired.
Basic outline to Achieving Our Plan:
Basic outline to Achieving Our Plan:
Reach out to Replenish or food pantries in the Allendale area to establish what types of food they accept.
Provide information to the students that live in the on-campus dorms.
As a capstone project for ENS students, coordinate the following in future years:
Ask for volunteers from either the food pantries or students on campus.
Acquire a cooler and boxes to collect the donations.
Have set times during move out week where students can donate their unused foods.
Transport the donations collected to the food pantries.
The Take Away:
The Take Away:
Our proposal is not the solution. Food waste is a much larger issue that needs to be tackled at the source. We are looking for certain ways to help and start a conversation that hopefully turns into a movement. By creating a conversation we hope that other passionate people get behind the problem and brainstorm ways to be proactive. We realize that many people are not aware of the huge issue of food waste. Watching a documentary called Just Eat It: A Food Waste Story really opened our eyes to the problem. The movie brought the conversation to us and we hope to pass it forward to others. When enough people are discussing it and finding ways to help, that is when a movement can be achieved.
If our project catches some ground, it could be expanded into a campus wide measure where we look to recover food throughout more areas of student housing and take it to people who would benefit from it. Our ideal is being able to start a battle against the massive food waste issue and rerouting the accumulating waste to the people and students that are food insecure. Dorm food recovery is a small start that Grand Valley can begin on a path to bettering food system flaws.
Just Eat It: A Food Waste Story is a documentary about Grant Baldwin and Jen Rustemyer, a couple in British Columbia who spend 6 months living off of only food that would otherwise be wasted. They emphasize all of the problems all along the food supply chain and how food is wasted for all different reasons. It starts with agricultural errors or waste due to consumer demand and explains why food gets thrown out at grocery stores before it is even considered to be expired because it is not aesthetically pleasing.
We provided a link to the video because the story that was told about food waste really opened our eyes to an issue that is not discussed enough by society.
Links:
Links:
Links to Replenish's website and some other food pantries in the area where food can be donated.
References:
References:
Dubick, James, Brandon Mathews, and Clare Cady, “Hunger on Campus: The Challenge of Food Insecurity for College Students.” College and University Food Bank Alliance; National Student Campaign Against Hunger and Homelessness; Student Government Resource Center; Student Public Interest Research Groups. 2016, pp. 22
Arnold, Sharelle. Personal Interview. 22 Jan 2020.
Robertson, Margaret. “FOOD.” Sustainability: Principles and Practice, 2nd ed., Routledge, 2017, pp. 225–249.
Cooks, Leda. “Food Savers or Food Saviors? Food Waste, Food Recovery Networks, and Food Justice.” Gastronomica, vol. 19, no. 3, Fall 2019, pp. 8–19. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1525/gfc.2019.19.3.8.
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