Pictured above: Mount Holyoke’s Reusable To-Go containers. Image courtesy of Trinity Kendrick ‘21.
By Catelyn Fitzgerald ’24
Staff Writer
With the highest number of students back on campus since March 2020, Mount Holyoke College has made several changes to accommodate the surge in activity while protecting students’ safety. The most striking of these changes is perhaps in Dining Services, where dining rooms have closed and a takeout-only policy has been adopted. The Dining Commons are no longer a hub of social activity. Instead, students file through the dining center in one direction, stopping at stations where dining staff serve them under plastic barriers.
Along with health and safety, sustainability became a major concern when developing the spring 2021 dining program. Executive Director of Auxiliary Services Rich Perna expressed that Dining Services not only values sustainability, but also understands its importance to students, making it central to plans for the spring semester.
“Our goals have not changed,” Perna said regarding sustainability. To avoid falling back on their trajectory toward sustainability goals while vastly altering dining operations, Dining Services chose to explore reusable to-go containers.
During the fall semester, when only a small number of students resided on campus, Dining Services served food exclusively in single-use, compostable takeout containers. While the compostable containers worked well for the small student population, they were a less feasible choice for the 750 residential students that returned to campus for the spring semester. Perna estimated that if Dining Services continued to use only single-use containers, upwards of 4,000 containers would be used a day. Along with their potential environmental impact, Perna noted that “costs are astronomical with all the paper goods.” This made the switch to a reusable alternative the best choice for the College.
Reusable containers present their own challenges, as they have to stand up to daily wear and tear by hundreds of students as well as the Dining Common’s industrial dishwasher. After meeting with several suppliers, Dining Services purchased reusable food containers that could withstand 10,000 washes, marking the beginning of a greener food service system. They then bought reusable drink tumblers that can be used for both hot and cold beverages. After considering reusable, BPA-free plastic utensils, Dining Services opted to use traditional silverware to offer students a more authentic dining experience. Students were given two food containers, two drink tumblers and two sets of silverware at the start of the semester to allow them to take multiple meals at once and minimize trips to the Dining Commons.
While the use of reusable containers is unprecedented in Mount Holyoke's dining program, the idea did not come out of the blue. According to Perna, Dining Services was already working toward implementing a reusable drink thermos when the pandemic hit. Despite this, Perna could not comment on whether the to-go program would continue for years to come. “We don’t really know what this is costing us at the moment,” Perna said of the containers, adding that in the next few months they would be able to better understand the costs of the program and assess its viability for a regular academic year.
In the face of the many changes Mount Holyoke students are experiencing this semester, Dining Services has fought to keep as much of the student dining experience the same as possible. Many colleges and universities use what Perna called a “one size fits all approach” by only offering premade to-go boxes. However, at Mount Holyoke, Dining Services wished to “keep the integrity of [the] program” by opening a variety of stations and allowing students to choose their own foods.
Despite having a smaller residential population to serve, Dining Services has maintained the same level of local purchasing as it did before the pandemic. “The volume of purchasing, let’s say local and sustainable, is way down,” said Perna, but Dining Services continues to spend 20 percent of its food budget on local and sustainable purchases and is on track to increase this to 25 percent by 2022.
One downside of the to-go program is that it challenges Dining Services’ ability to track and limit post-consumer food waste. Blanchard’s central waste disposal system, featuring dehydrators that transform food and paper goods into compost that is a fraction of its original volume, will no longer process students’ food waste, the bulk of which is instead thrown out in residential halls. This makes food waste more difficult to measure and increases the risk of improper food disposal.
Perna commented that there may be a way to measure food waste in residence halls in the future, but in the meantime, Dining Services is focusing on maintaining awareness of food waste and cutting down on waste created during the food production process. As they prepare meals, staff members measure their food waste using Blanchard’s Leanpath system, which weighs and takes a picture of food scraps, creating an opportunity to identify sources of excess waste, which can then be communicated back to the staff. “It’s very easy for things to just slip by,” Perna said of pre-consumer waste, making the system a key part of preventing repeated food waste from going unnoticed. The Leanpath system also allows for collaboration between dining chefs in which one can use food that may be thrown out by another.
In the future, Dining Services wishes to maintain and build on existing sustainability initiatives, such as their collaboration with Smith College in purchasing whole cows and pigs from local farms. The program partners the farms with butchers, allowing local livestock producers to sell to the colleges without taking extra steps to process and package their meat. In the college kitchens, the whole animal is utilized in food preparation. Dining Services will also expand local purchasing and is especially interested in supporting the local dairy industry.
Not only is there hope to sustain and grow current green initiatives, but Perna also added that Dining Services would like to revive past sustainability efforts. “About a year and a half ago, we were getting quite a bit of produce from the student farm,” said Perna, adding that he would be interested in student gardening to help supply the Dining Commons again in the future.
While Dining Services has endured countless alterations due to the COVID-19 pandemic, its commitment to sustainability and future goals to reduce its environmental impact remain unchanged. Not only does the eco to-go program solve the immediate challenges of the pandemic, but with student encouragement, it may open the gates for a permanent inclusion of reusable containers in the Dining Commons.