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Operation Clean Plate Weighs Half a Ton of Food Waste in One Week
By Miranda Hucks
Contemplate before you masticate. Many Mars Hill students have learned the meaning of this saying over the fall semester. It translates to: Think before you chew. It was the motto of Operation Clean Plate.
Operation Clean Plate is a class project used at MHC to help reduce food waste.
Statistics show that dining facilities on campuses are known to take up to five times more water, five times more energy, and with that, five times more waste per square foot than dorms.
Larry Stern’s Research Activity class at MHC decided to focus its semester project on the amount of food waste in Pittman Dining Hall.
For one week, the class split into teams with the common purpose of evaluating the amount of food waste in the Mars Hill College cafeteria.
During this week, a little over half a ton of food was wasted in Mars Hill’s dining hall.
“We considered who we really wanted to target and how we wanted to approach the project,” said Lacey Davis, a student in the class. “Some groups simply asked questions about food waste and did research in the library and on the computer.”
Based on their research, the class wrote a survey of questions and decided how to actually measure the food that was wasted, Davis said. The class weighed the food that was sent back on dirty dishes.
The class created a time chart for when students would individually come in and work in the cafeteria to scrape the food waste and measure it.
Depending on the credit hours needed, each student worked one-hour individual shifts during a one week period during lunch and dinner hours to measure wasted food.
“It was surprising how easy it was to get cooperation from every member of the class and quickly form the time chart,” said Nena Bryant, another classmate.
While working in the cafeteria, each student had to wear an apron, latex gloves and closed-toed shoes. The job included scraping trays into a garbage can and handing off empty plates for machine washing. At the end of each shift, the amount of waste was weighed and logged. Typically, the weight of the garbage from one day’s waste was too large for students to pick up themselves.
“It made me feel gross,” said Todd Allen, another class member. “It made me rethink how much food I personally waste. After this experience I try to waste as little food as possible because I know firsthand what the cafeteria workers go through in the back; it’s not a pretty sight.”
Devon Kearney, another member of the class, said it was also eye-opening.
“In class, we came to the conclusion that if each student wasted just 4 ounces of food a day, a little over a ton of food would be wasted in our cafeteria weekly,” Kearney said.
The class then began to collaborate with Stern to establish specific dates and deadlines for project stages. The class created a group that was in charge of creating a rough draft of a survey. The survey including questions such as: How can we reduce waste? What difference would it make if food waste were cut in half? When your plate is placed on the conveyor belt, what is usually left on it?
Francisco Rodriquez, a student in the class, said the survey had a good response -- 243 completed surveys out of about 255.
“People responded well and seemed to be genuinely honest with their responses,” Rodriquez said.
A group was also in charge of making posters to raise awareness of the project and make students aware of food waste, and a group was in charge of creating flyers to hand out in the cafeteria prior to the survey.
Posters were displayed in main buildings on campus with sayings such as “Stop Wasting Food!”; “How much food are you wasting?”; and “Contemplate before you masticate.”
Flyers were handed out in the cafeteria and placed on the tops of tables describing the amount of food being wasted every day, in hopes that it would affect diners’ choices to reduce food waste.
A follow-up survey was also conducted. It targeted specific groups. The class came up with two specific hypotheses: athletes waste more food than non-athletes, and underclassmen waste more food than upperclassmen.
To test these, each member of the class was required to hand out surveys to a specific group. Only eight surveys were collected. Most of the survey questions were multiple choices, but there was one open-ended question.
One of the first questions asked how important food waste was to the reader. The subject could either respond: very important, important, somewhat important, little importance, or not important at all. Another question asked how many times per week did the subject eat in the cafeteria.
The answers were broken down into intervals that ranged from zero times per week to 19 times per week. What time of the day students ate was also assessed in the survey. A final open-ended question was: What do you like most about the cafeteria?
The survey data was broken down into categories and labeled by letters and numbers. One group produced a big spreadsheet that condensed all the survey information. It then looked at the results and was able to produce many different types of graphs that would make it easier to understand the results.
The follow-up survey indicated that the first hypothesis of athletes wasting more food than non-athletes was incorrect. Athletes responded that they were actually more likely to leave their plates clean rather than non-athletes.
However, the other hypothesis seemed to be correct. Upperclassmen, juniors and seniors, were less likely to waste food than underclassmen, freshmen and sophomores. The survey also found that upperclassmen were more likely to waste the entrée, whereas upperclassmen wasted half as many salads. Both upper- and underclassmen wasted condiments more than any other type of food.
Miranda Hucks, a Hilltop staff member, took part in the food waste project as a student in the Research Activity class.
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