How much food does your lunch period waste?
“We don't pay for the food, we don’t even know where it comes from, who pays for it, or how much it costs. Maybe this is why fresh fruit, ice cold milk, and succulent chicken get thrown away like an old pair of worn out shoes,” responded 5th grade teacher Ms. Post
Many people believe that Mauro-Sheridan students waste a lot of food. Wasting food is throwing away food you did not eat. In every lunch wave students throw away pizza, salad, bagels, fruit, and cheese sticks with only taking a few bites or less.
According to the food administrator, who met with Student Council, every day, every student gets a free lunch and a free breakfast, and ALL kids must take 3 of the 5 food groups. Since the district is large, there is a discount to the food they purchase.
“It’s incredible how much food is thrown away.” said paraprofessional Ms. Goodwin.
“It's very disheartening to see kids take one bite and throw the rest away, I would love to see a solution,” answered the principal Mrs. K. “This would be a great research topic for upper grade kids to research and implement a program to solve. This is something to bring up to a teacher meeting.”
In Mr. Williams’ tutorial enrichment program for grades 3-8, the breakfast leftovers from homeroom are saved. Mr. Williams said, “What we do is, we have it as our snack.”
Other teachers, like Mrs. Jokl, collect food from breakfast for snacks like Mr. Williams. Other teachers send their food to the nurse.
Keegan Goodwin and Warren Nelson, third graders, think kids throw away food because they don’t like it, food waste is bad, their lunch period wastes a lot. Warren thinks that kids should finish their food to stop the waste.
Members of Student Council met with a member of New Haven’s Food Services. NHPS tries to prevent food waste by having the kitchen managers in each school log how much food was left over and not served. They make adjustments to how much food is made for future lunches so that leftover food doesn’t get thrown out.
According to National Geographic Kids Almanac 2017 there is enough food that is wasted to feed the approximately 1 billion homeless people in the world 3 times over.