Huge amounts of food pass through Binghamton University’s campus dining halls every day. Much of it is picked up, bought and eventually eaten by hungry BU students.
But where do the uneaten vittles go? “The garbage can” may be the first stop for some of it, but what to do with uneaten food is a real issue for Sodexho, BU’s on-campus dining services provider. At the end of the day, there are several possible destinations for leftover fare.
Again, the first possibility is obvious: the waste bin. Officials had a hard time putting a number on how many pounds of food are discarded by students daily, but it’s certainly no small figure: there are five dining halls, a number of retail establishments, including the Food Court in the New University Union and the Kosher Kitchen. Even so, Robert Griffin, Sodexho’s marketing director, said that the amount of food thrown away at BU compared to other universities is “typically very little.” He attributed this to a decision Sodexho made several years ago to switch the cooking method employed in the dining halls to “batch cooking” — one in which the number of meals prepared reflects the number of people expected to consume them. Additional batches are prepared but not cooked until needed, causing far less excess food waste.
Still, despite the fact that much of the dining hall food can be reused from day to day, perishable items like meats, dairy products and certain preservative-free baked goods are disposed of regularly to avoid spoilage and its associated health risks.
A less wasteful end point for food waste is the University’s compost pile and organic garden, on Bunn Hill Road. They are run by interns and students from BU’s Office of Recycling and Resource Management and filled with scraps obtained each week from BU’s dining halls, like coffee grinds and salad bar fixings. But to figure out just how much compost a mid-sized research university can produce, the Office of Recycling and Resource Management conducted a “waste-stream analysis” (a fancy term for digging through trash) at Dickinson Dining Hall.
“For one day, we found 75 pounds of compostable food waste,” said Environmental Resource Manager Juliet Berling.
Leftovers that are not thrown away or composted make their way to a third destination: charity. Several times a year, Sodexho donates large quantities of food to the Community Hunger Outreach Warehouse, or CHOW, located in Binghamton. Last year’s donation was estimated at around 30,000 pounds — roughly $10,000 worth of food.
Although around 90 percent of the items consisted of dry goods, shipments also included “whatever perishable items we felt comfortable giving them based on food safety regulations,” Griffin said.
CHOW often operates in conjunction with Broome Bounty, a local transport service that aids in the distribution of food donations to nearby soup kitchens and food pantries. Aside from Sodexho, CHOW’s food supply comes via individual donors, school food drives and contributions from area restaurants and supermarkets. According to Ed Blaine, the organization’s director, around 1,700,000 pounds of food were distributed last year.
According to a 2006 study on hunger in the Southern Tier, approximately 9,000 Broome County residents travel to a soup kitchen or food pantry every week, amounting to more than two million meals served in 2005 alone.