Last week, I wrote about a food waste weighing week at Virginia Tech created and implemented by Andy Sarjahani, a soon-to-be registered dietitian.
Sarjahani (that’s him pictured below) and other student volunteers weighed the waste from each 
meal during a week with trays and a week without. After comparing the numbers, they found that removing the trays cut cafeteria food waste by 29 percent!
Furthermore, 60 percent of the tossed food came from plate waste, what students took, but didn’t eat. The remainder stemmed from the kitchen preparing more food than was needed.
Sarjahani, who is now working and blogging on a sustainable farm in New York, found it difficult to observe whole trays and whole fruits being tossed. After sorting through tons of edible food waste, he didn’t mince words:
I think “all-you-can-eat†is really the culprit. Going trayless is like a cortisone shot—it treats the problem on the surface, but not at the root.
Sarjahani, 25, presented his findings to the school administration and heads of campus dining in early May. They must have been impressed with the report because the school will go trayless in July!
While the root problem remains intact, a cortisone shot can be quite useful.
Comments
2 responses to “Virginia Tech II”
What an interesting experiment. I guess because you CAN fit more food on a tray, many people DO. Perhaps these findings will be a step in the right direction for small portions. This would help cut down on waste and our nation’s ever expanding waist lines.
I just can’t get over the amount of food wasted. I work at a university and wonder how much food is being wasted at the residential and retail dining facilities here on campus.
I think he is on to something though, the ‘all you can eat’ mentality allows us to get way more food than we can or should eat without feeling bad about it, I mean, it’s the premise of the all you can eat experience.
Sounds like Sarjahani is a smart and motivated man with a mission that America needs to take seriously!
Go to any ‘all you can eat’ joint and you will see a majority of obese people stuffing as much as possible onto trays and throwing out at least 1/2 of each plates food in order to go back and stuff even more different food onto more plates, only to repeat the same wasteful process. All the while many people in poorer nations have to stress about feeding their kids anything at all!
How to get that ‘saved’ food into the bellies of the needy is the next part of the mission. Right here in America, at this very moment there are thousands of people in every big city that cannot get enough food to eat.
More power to you Mr. S !!!!!
I hope that you have started a new trend that changes at least one portion of a very sad reality.