BY ELLA WHITE ’22
STAFF WRITER
Due to the many changes to on-campus dining in the spring 2021 term, food waste within Mount Holyoke Dining Services has become untraceable.
The changes to on-campus dining have included limited hours, as well as students being prohibited from serving themselves. Students are expected to empty any leftovers into compost bins in their own dorms. Previously, food waste and composting was funneled through the Dining Commons.
While some food waste is returned in students’ reusable containers, Dining Services requests that students empty out food privately. Now, with food being discarded in the various trash cans and compost bins in student housing, the College cannot track student food waste.
Assistant Director of Culinary Operations Shawn Kelsey said that the Dining Services’ menu and procedure is constantly evolving during the pandemic. In addition to the procedural changes, “We have had to change our menus at times when something becomes impossible to get,” he said. “Nothing has really been completely eliminated, as we have shifted our menus to include something from our whole dining program in some way.”
The limited number of students on campus has posed “a real challenge to our food waste efforts … when you have this much food for such [a] low volumes of diners,” Kelsey said. Using LeanPath, a technology company specializing in food waste data collection, Dining Services was able to correct some initial problems and better measure the pre-consumer food waste generated by the actual food preparation.
Dining Services presently tracks which stations waste food, what was wasted, when and why. “This allows us to make adjustments on what we are doing to correct any errors we may have with production, ordering, forecasting, cooking and even menuing,” Kelsey said.
Prior to the pandemic, Dining Services had plans to expand its food waste measurement by implementing a program which would allow it to measure food waste generated post-consumer and estimate the number of people who could have been fed with the excess.
“It would have been a way to educate the students on the drastic number of pounds of food waste, to hopefully encourage everybody to take a little less and reduce the overall waste,” Kelsey said. The program would have included infographics posted at the dish return area to remind students to waste less.
“After we find out how the dining program will move forward in the fall, we will see how to get back on track with that endeavor,” Kelsey said. At present, Dining Services has not announced any plans in this regard.