The number of meals a week that are wasted at the University: 300. The number of people the University can feed with these meals a month: 1,200.
One group trying to bring awareness to these statistics is Campus Kitchens, a national initiative that partners with college and high school students to use lost meals from dining halls to help the greater community.
Currently, Campus Kitchens is located at one high school and 19 universities, including Wake Forest University and the College of William & Mary. The organization has donated more than 715,000 meals since its conception in 2001.
Here at the University, fourth-year Engineering student Caroline Nettles began working last year with fellow fourth-year College student Ayisha Memon to bring this program to the Charlottesville community.
Nettles said she was inspired to start the program after living in her sorority house. Every week, her sorority made enough meals for everyone signed up for the meal plan, but many sisters did not come to eat.
“I could barely pick up the trash bag [after dinner] because of so much waste,” Nettles recalled.
After seeing all these meals go uneaten, Nettles wanted to approach the problem from an environmental engineering standpoint. “As engineers, we’re taught over and over again about our ethical responsibility to make the community a better place,” Nettles explained.
Nettles saw this predicament as her opportunity to better society. In response, she created a capstone project titled “Food Rescue” to study the flow of food from procurement to disposal.
But Nettles also wanted to work on a smaller scale to help the Charlottesville community more directly. “I started thinking that if [the sorority house] had this food left over ... [Then] the dining hall probably had a really hard time estimating the number of meals to [serve],” Nettles said.
Memon came to the same realization after seeing how much food went to waste through her experiences at the dining hall. She said she never used all of her meal plan meals during her first year and knew that many other students did the same.
“There are people who need the food in the community,” Memon said.
Memon finally took action last summer when she sent out an e-mail asking her friends for help. Eventually, she heard of Campus Kitchens and teamed with Nettles to start a branch at the University.
“We were coming at it from different angles,” Nettles said, “but it turned into the same goal.”
The two said Campus Kitchens is scheduled to start at the University in August. ARAmark, the University’s dining services, already cleared space in Runk Dining Hall for Campus Kitchens.
The food that will go to the Campus Kitchens projects would have gone instead to employee meals or meal preparations, according to an ARAmark press release.
The program will be run entirely by student volunteers, who will work in one- to two-hour shifts collecting the food, making the meals or distributing them to the community. The national organization will financially support the group, so the University will not lose any money, ARAmark representative Nicole Jackson said.
“We believe in the ability of our students,” Jackson said. “[Campus Kitchens] really will succeed.”
Although Memon said she was initially concerned that ARAmark would be difficult to cooperate with, the company has been very supportive so far. She added that ARAmark was actually looking for a way to save the extra food.
Everything might seem like it has been taken care of, but Campus Kitchens has run into a problem: All of its core members are fourth-year students. Current members are creating a leadership team right now to continue the group next year.
The project is just beginning, but University students outside the program already have expressed support, Memon said, adding that she wants Campus Kitchens to involve the entire University community, including Greek life. When the group visited Washington and Lee University, Nettles said both a fraternity and sorority centered their philanthropy projects around collecting turkeys and making pies for Campus Kitchens’ meals.
First-year Architecture student Stephanie Burcham said she believes Campus Kitchens will benefit the Charlottesville community as a whole. “It gives away what otherwise would have been wasted food to people who really need it.”
Read More
A review on a year with a roommate
By Rosie Strickland | 3 days agoMy roommate has indirectly taught me the importance of learning how to build my own routine.
Africa Day captures the ‘essence’ of African heritage
By Kate Johnson | 4 days agoSaturday's sold-out event featured a four-hour program of modeling scenes, dance performances and musical acts in the Newcomb Ballroom.
A guide to the perfect first date
By Anna Stamey | 5 days agoHere's my take on the formula you should use to scheme a potentially perfect date.
