In Peter Singer’s The Good Life he mentions that “the brain is a tool for reasoning, and a capacity to reason helps us to survive, to feed ourselves, and to safeguard our children.” (264) As college students make the transition from home life to living at a university, they lose the safety provided by their parents as well as certain amenities, such as home-cooked meals. In order to help these new “adults” manage this transitory period, most universities require students to live in on-campus housing and purchase meal plans. These modern American dining halls included in the meal plan are typically open seven days a week, providing a constant flow of food and eliminating the stress of having to feed ourselves. The same continuous stockpile of food that provides a convenience to newly admitted freshmen also results in a highly unsustainable practice of large scale food waste. This unstainable practice is repeated year after year because people are able to reason through the negative impact of food waste by way of personal convenience, personal benefits, and lack of knowledge regarding the impact of such waste. Without taking a step back to look at the greater picture, it is difficult to realize that the convenience of grabbing a burger from under the hot light does not outweigh the negative impact on both the economy and the environment. Over the past decade universities have increased food waste in an attempt to better serve and attract more students. According to Julie Metos, the nutrition chair at the University of Utah, when it comes to dining, universities are “trying to market to the student [because] that’s their customer.” While this is beneficial to the student who can now get prepared food seven days a week, thirteen to sixteen hours a day, it is not a sustainable practice. Despite this, the practice persists both because the college promotes only the benefits of on-campus dining and because students, like myself, fall prey to selfish behavior. Moreover, Auburn University states that eating on campus, among peers and professors, makes for students who are “far more likely to succeed in the rigorous academic environment of college life.” By this logic, which is common among four-year universities, the success of the students is another reason why the administration and students should be able to partake in such an unsustainable practice. Their ability to reason through the food waste, for the reasons mentioned above, only worsens the already-present economic and environmental issues surrounding large scale food waste. With over two-thousand four-year universities in the United States alone, most with multiple dining halls, the amount of food wasted is immense. According to Recyclingworks Massachusetts, students living on campus with a meal plan waste an estimate of 141.75 pounds of food a year, almost four times the amount as a student living off-campus. Statistics provided by the Journal of Hunger and Environmental Nutrition paint a similar picture. A
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On a larger scale, an estimated forty percent of the food produced in America is wasted and universities are only contributing to that waste. From an economic standpoint, the food Americans waste every year leads to billions of dollars being pointlessly spent to produce and prepare food that is never consumed. With many families living on tight budgets and the global population continuing to expand every year, the need to reconsider using our limited resources on producing food that is later trashed is immense. These wasted resources, such as water, fertilizer, land, and energy used to produce food are not only affecting the economy but are also part of the environmental consequences of food waste. Such environmental consequences are amplified by the fact that the food taken to landfills rots into methane gas, a potent greenhouse gas with a “high global warming potential.” (Scottish Environmental Protection Agency) The massive piles of food waste are one of the leading sources of man-made methane gas production. As Jared Diamond points out in his work “The World as Polder: What Does It Mean To Us Today,” we, as humans, are “the cause of our environmental problems, [and] we are the ones in control of them.” Since universities are contributing to the problem of large scale food waste, they can also take control and work to create more sustainable practices while also helping students through the transition from high school to
On a larger scale, an estimated forty percent of the food produced in America is wasted and universities are only contributing to that waste. From an economic standpoint, the food Americans waste every year leads to billions of dollars being pointlessly spent to produce and prepare food that is never consumed. With many families living on tight budgets and the global population continuing to expand every year, the need to reconsider using our limited resources on producing food that is later trashed is immense. These wasted resources, such as water, fertilizer, land, and energy used to produce food are not only affecting the economy but are also part of the environmental consequences of food waste. Such environmental consequences are amplified by the fact that the food taken to landfills rots into methane gas, a potent greenhouse gas with a “high global warming potential.” (Scottish Environmental Protection Agency) The massive piles of food waste are one of the leading sources of man-made methane gas production. As Jared Diamond points out in his work “The World as Polder: What Does It Mean To Us Today,” we, as humans, are “the cause of our environmental problems, [and] we are the ones in control of them.” Since universities are contributing to the problem of large scale food waste, they can also take control and work to create more sustainable practices while also helping students through the transition from high school to