Yuting Lam Why do UC Berkeley Students Waste Food at Dining Halls? Spring 2010 1 Why Do UC Berkeley Students Waste Food at Dining Halls? Yuting Lam ABSTRACT Food waste creates many social and environmental problems. Minimizing food waste can increase the availability of nutrients to individuals and improve community health and food security. Reducing food waste can promote environmental sustainability through energy and water conservation. Local efforts in minimizing food waste are believed to be more effective than non-specific, large-scale efforts. I studied why UC Berkeley students did not finish their food at the dining halls by surveying 500 UC Berkeley students. I used Microsoft Excel to store and analyze my data. I examined how dining halls’ serving styles, such as buffet or a la carte serving, the use of tray, serving portion and food quality affect students’ food wasting behavior. Results showed that a la carte serving and the use of trays helped generate less food waste. Poor food quality and being served too much at buffet dining halls were top reasons why students wasted food. This study is served as a reference for implementing suitable strategies to reduce students’ food waste. KEYWORDS Cafeteria, plate waste, food quality, a la carte, serving portionYuting Lam Why do UC Berkeley Students Waste Food at Dining Halls? Spring 2010 2 INTRODUCTION Food waste creates both social and environment problems in the United States (Sobal and Nelson 2003). Kantor et al. (1997) showed that we are wasting half of the food we produced. In 2008, of the 250 million tons of municipal solid waste generated in the US, food scraps comprises 12.7%, which is the third largest portion after paper and yard trimmings (EPA 2008). Besides, The United States Department of Agriculture estimates that recovering 5% of 44 million tons of food waste could feed four millions out of 38 millions undernourished people in the US (USDA 2004). Minimizing food waste can increase the availability of nutrients to individuals, improve community health and food security (Hamm and Bellows 2003). Reducing food waste can promote environmental sustainability through energy and water conservation (Griffin et al. 2008). Energy is used during food production, distribution, and waste processing. Heller and Keoleian (2000) showed that energy used for food production, excluding transportation and packaging, accounted for 17% of all fossil fuel use in the US. The energy content of food as well as the energy that involved in producing, processing, transporting, marketing and storing food is lost when the food is discarded (Blair and Sobal 2006). Besides, Food waste is directly related to water waste because water is used in food production (UNEP 2008). Food waste also contributes to air pollution, such as methane from decaying food and water pollution from runoff or leaching from landfills (Rathje 1992), which threaten the environment and community health (Griffin et al. 2008). To prevent food waste from further deteriorating our environment, as well as other social issues, it is important to look for suitable strategies to reduce food waste. There has been a growing practice of recycling used materials since 1990 (EPA 2008), and the recycling of food scrapes is composting. Composting has grown recently as a means of diverting food waste from landfills to composting sites. Even though food wastes can be reused through composting, composting is costly, and requires energy such as transporting food waste to composting sites. While it is impossible to eliminate food waste, there are strategies to minimize food waste. The most efficient way to reduce foodservice and consumer food waste is not to generate it at the first place (Kantor et al. 1997). As local efforts in minimizing food waste are believed to be more effective than non-specific, large-scale efforts (Griffin, 2008), I have chosen a small-scale, local food system for my study – the UC Berkeley dining hall system. At UC Berkeley, Cal Dining is the major foodYuting Lam Why do UC Berkeley Students Waste Food at Dining Halls? Spring 2010 3 operation that operates the only four dining halls on campus: Café 3, Clark Kerr Dining (Clark kerr), Crossroads and Foothill Dining (Foothill). These four dining halls serve about 5580 students per day (Cal dining 2009). Cal Dining has implemented different sustainability practices, including composting organic food waste, providing a wide range of organic food, donating food to a non-profit family shelter, and serving local produce (Cal dining 2009). Yet in 2005, students at these four all-you-can-eat-dining halls discarded about 1.2 tons of unconsumed food after being served (UC Berkeley Sustainability Assessment 2005). Cal Dining acknowledges the large amount of food waste, and has recently made two major changes in their policies in the hope of reducing food waste: One of the four dining halls, Foothill, switched from buffet to an a la carte serving system beginning in fall 2009, and the other three buffet dining halls stopped providing trays since Spring 2010. An a la carte dining hall means that food is charged per item, which is the direct opposite of a buffet dining hall, which is an al-you-can-eat dining hall. Sarjahani et al. (2009) shows that a la carte serving generates less food scraps than buffet servings. Karstens and Moe (2009) shows that not only 10% food waste was reduced at their school cafeteria by not using trays, but also a reduction in water and electricity usage from washing the trays. Cal Dining estimated that the a la carte system could reduce 10% of food waste that was generated under the buffet style (Daily Californian, 2009). Apart from the dining hall’s serving style and the use of tray, there are other factors that drive students not to finish their meals such as dining hall’s food quality (Guthrie and Budzy 2002). It is important to find out what these drivers are, so that Cal Dining can change its policies accordingly to reduce food waste, however no studies have been conducted to investigate why students waste food at UC Berkeley’s dining halls. In order to investigate why students do not finish their meal at the dining hall, I collected opinions from students who were frequent diners at the dining halls through surveys. My research question is why diners waste food. I hypothesize that the buffet serving style, and low
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