Food Waste
By DANIEL SIEGEL ’21
You walk into Forbes and smell the sweet aroma of whatever SAGE is making that day. Walking straight through the lunch line, you fill your plate with pizza, pasta, fruits, vegetables, and possibly a brownie or two. After taking a few bites, you realize that you ate one too many breakfast sandwiches from the Snack Bar and dispose your delicious lunch. You are certainly doing SAGE a service by throwing out your food into the trash can before giving it to the lunch lady who then cleans it, but, in general, throwing out excess food does the environment, and people around the world, a disservice.
According to an April article from sciencedaily.com, every day 150,000 tons of food are wasted in America. This represents approximately one pound of waste per person. The total volume of discarded food is equivalent to the use of 30 million acres of land, 780 million pounds of pesticide, and 4.2 trillion gallons of irrigated water. Additionally, theatlantic.com notes that America wastes sixty million tons of produce every year, which is equal to one hundred and fifty billion dollars.
This volume of waste is a problem for many reasons, but the two main reasons are environmental and humanitarian. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), asted food is the single largest occupant in landfills. These organic materials, such as food scraps, are compacted and covered with other things when they are put in landfills. According to Environment Victoria, an Australian environmentalist nonprofit, landfills remove oxygen from the process of breaking down the food, and instead anaerobic processes break down food, releasing methane—a greenhouse gas which is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
Campuses around the world have different for dealing with all of this waste. There are three main non-profit programs in the United States that help campuses manage and reduce their waste: Campus Kitchen Project, Food Recovery Network, and Post Landfill Action Network. The missions of all these programs involve recovering of waste, transforming waste (cooking it and turning it into meals), and delivering waste to people who don’t have food or who are unable to afford their own meals.
After contacting Linnea Engstrom, chair of Milton’s Sustainability Committee, and Alexandra Brown, Office Manager of SAGE Dining Services, I was pleasantly surprised to learn what Milton does with its food waste. If you haven’t noticed, there are large brown bins and smaller grey bins that serve as locations to dispose of food waste. The food that ends up in those bins is sent to a compactor behind the dining hall. From there, a local waste hauler, Troupe, collects the waste and transports it to Hidden Acres Farm. Hidden Acres Farm is the only traditional, open-air composting farm that serves our area. Milton has been composting for 3 years. It is important to note that everything in Forbes, including plastic cups and plates, is compostable with the one exception of oyster cracker wrappers.
Composting at Milton is not only limited to Forbes—there is also an opportunity to compost in the dorms. There are three, 5-gallon buckets located in all dorms where food scraps can be deposited. Every week, these buckets are picked up, sent to Hidden Acre Farms, and replaced with new buckets. This initiative is handled by Bootstrap Composting, a business that is run by Milton Alumnus Andy Brooks. In the Milton Academy Lower School, Ms. McGuinness, Milton’s environmental specialist who directs the composting program, states that once this food is composted, the compost is scattered among 4 raised beds around campus. These beds are used to grow food which is then sent to the Milton Food Pantry; last week, approximately 30 pounds of bok choy, arugula, and swiss chard was donated, the first delivery of the year.
