Like most universities, the University of Maryland, College Park used to send all of its dining halls’ leftover food at closing time to either landfills or composting facilities. Dozens of tons worth of edible food was wasted yearly.
This waste wasn’t the fault of the university, who responsibly recycled and composted all the food that it could. It was simply the way the business ran. While everyone in UMD’s Dining Services from the director to the dishwashers hated to see the food go to waste, there was simply no way for them to connect surplus food to those who needed it without taking on new labor and transportation costs that would never see a monetary return on investment.
So, a group of students from Alpha Phi Omega (APO) service fraternity led
by Evan Ponchick took up the initiative. After a year of persistence and
developing logistics, APO, Dining Services, So Others Might Eat (SOME)
and Hillel came together to launch the first trial run of the APO Food
Recovery and Donation Project and donated over 2,300 meals in the Fall
2010 semester! Find out more about the APO Food Recovery and Donations
Project here.
At the same time, Ben Simon and Mia Zavalij of The Love Movement (TLM)
launched TLM's Food Recovery Network to recover food from Route 1
restaurants. The two projects merged, and, after enlisting the help of
MaryPIRG, recovered 4,000 additional meals in the Spring of 2011, allowing them
to expand to include SOME's Mickey Leland Place and Harvest House.
Our network has already donated over 30,000 meals as of March 2012. We are growing our impact fast here at UMD and have reached a rate of about 15,000 meals per semester. Part of that came from our expansion to recovering from UMD’s basketball and football games, where we get massive amounts of delicious leftover concessions food: hotdogs, hamburgers, pretzels, fries, and occasionally crab cakes (we are the University of Maryland, after all). Our record? From a single basketball game, on New Year’s Eve 2011, we donated 727 meals!
But, while loading up trash bags bursting with hot dog buns at sports games and carrying trays upon trays of a huge variety of food like pasta and steak from the diner, it’s difficult to imagine that just a couple years ago all of this food was going to waste. Going back decades, how many hundreds of thousands or even millions of people could UMD alone have fed if Food Recovery Network had been in place? Then we started to ask ourselves, “Why doesn’t every college in America have a Food Recovery Network?” and “How much good food is going to waste each year from college campuses?”
We did a little bit of research and what we found was shocking: between 75% and 90% of colleges don’t have any food recovery program in place at all. America has approximately 3,000 colleges. If we estimate that each is wasting about 10,000 meals a year that could be donated, then at least 22 million meals of good food are being tossed out on college campuses. The lack of food recovery programs on campus is part of a larger paradox of massive food waste persisting side by side with hunger in America. Every year, 68 billion pounds of food goes to waste in America, while one in seven American households are food insecure.
We have since been determined to spread the movement to other campuses nationally. Food Recovery Network recently became a nonprofit in Maryland and we are applying for 501(c)(3) status in pursuit of a vision of national expansion. Last fall, students at Brown University started an FRN chapter that has already been extremely successful and is growing fast. Two existing food recovery programs under different names, at Pomona College and University of California Berkeley, are becoming Food Recovery Network affiliate chapters as we join forces to forge a larger, more cohesive movement. We won $750 in the February 2012 Pitch Dingman competition to help fund our growth. We have created a new chapter toolkit and are currently coaching students at over 15 other colleges and universities across the country through the process of starting new FRN chapters.
Donating food that would be going to waste is a no-brainer. There is no better time than now to institute a program. Our team is determined to realize our vision of empowering student across the nation with the resources and inspiration to start several dozen new chapters in the next three years. We would like to invite you to join us. For students interested in starting a new chapter, we can provide you with general guidance, small grants, a website, and even a letter written from our Director of Dining Services addressed to yours laying out the benefits and encouraging him/her to start an FRN.
To learn more about joining the movement or to donate, email us at UMD@foodrecoverynetwork.org.
