By Jason Farrell
FGCU staff
Six hundred and twenty-nine pounds. That’s heavier than a pair of giant pandas. That was also the average daily food waste at SoVi Dining Hall during September, according to FGCU’s second annual Weigh the Waste.
Weigh the Waste is a class project for 29 Colloquium students. While similar projects have been done at other universities, at FGCU, students collaborate with staff in Eagle Dining and the Department of Environmental Health and Safety to raise awareness of food waste by weighing it. So far, it’s working.
“Eye opening,” Will Rodecher, a sophomore criminal justice student, described the experience. He and three of his classmates were intercepting trays at SoVi and sorting waste into five plastic bins: one each for meats, compostables, noncompostables, paper products and liquids. The bins each held 5 ½ gallons and were emptied every 20 minutes. The paper products were overflowing, and the liquids were an unappetizing brown color. “You don’t realize how much food you waste until you put it into bins,” Rodecher said.
Members of the class are not the only ones coming to this realization. Colby Davis, a junior business management major, agreed with his colleagues that students felt guilty when they saw their waste sorted in front of them. This is the exact effect Colloquium instructor and project cofounder Jessica Philips wanted.
“I do this is because it’s a visual representation,” she said. “I can tell them they are wasting 300 pounds of food. I can tell them until I’m blue in the face. But when they actually see it, and they are the actual ones throwing it away, they are able to grasp the importance.”
So far, the visual tactic has led to results. SoVi’s average daily food waste dropped 15 percent in October. In November, this drop-off was maintained, and there’s hope for even more positive results at spring weigh-ins — something students are helping to facilitate through social media, the creation of a compost pile and “Try Me” tables, where diners can sample food before taking a whole plate that they may not like. But most importantly, the students’ hard work is highlighting an all-too-often overlooked issue.
“We waste a lot of food,” said Jarrett Simpson, Eagle Dining’s marketing coordinator and the other founder of the project. He was visibly excited that one of SoVi’s daily operations had been turned into a learning experience for students. “This really opens eyes. And enlightens them to the small things that we are responsible for that we can change.”
— Jason Farrell is a program assistant in FGCU’s Writing Center