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niversity of Maryland, College
Park (UMD) alumni Ben
Simon, Mia Zavalij, and Cam
Pascual noticed a problematic trend as undergrad-
uates: uneaten food from campus dining halls was
thrown away, every night.
At the flagship institution, sitting just four miles
outside of Washington, D.C., with an enrollment
of more than ,
students, Zavalij estimated
this daily turnover, cumulatively, to be between
,
– ,
pounds a year.
“It was just something that does not feel right,
does not look right—to have a handful of delicious
good food, ready to go, ready to eat and then just
have that just tossed into a trashcan,” Simon said
recalling the nightly discards.
But the trend wasn’t unique to the campus. The
results of a
study by the Swedish Institute for
Food and Biotechnology—per the request of the
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United
Nations (FAO)—estimated that “roughly one-
third of food produced for human consumption
Tackling
food waste
from coast
to coast
By Lisa Dupree
October 2015
Policy&Practice
9
U