It was inspiring to hear about Chef Eric’s experiences with food waste in the industry and at LREI. I didn’t know about how the school does so much to try and repurpose foods for all types of meals. He told us about how they really try to emphasize using bi products in meals and trying to repurpose any type of fruits or vegetables. For example if they are chopping pineapple for the salad bar they will save the core and use it to make a pineapple juice. Or if they are using some sort of vegetable for a salad or a dish and they have scraps they will blend those scraps into a soup or a sauce. The one bi product that they don’t use is fruit skins because they tend to have a lot of bacteria and pesticides growing on them.

He also explained to us that most of the food that is wasted in the cafeteria comes from food that is returned and uneaten by kids of all ages throughout the school. He talks about how a lot of times people decide to take food and then not eat it because either someone gets caught up in a conversation with their friends or they just decide they’re not hungry, but then they have taken the food so it has to go into the garbage for safety reasons. So often there is food that kids don’t finish either because of the size of the portion or because of them overestimating how  much food they really want, but the school has really tried to make changes based on the needs and wants of the kids. For example the school had to buy smaller apples because they did a study a couple years ago about how kids, especially younger kids wouldn’t eat a whole apple and so it would get thrown away, so now they buy a smaller size of apples. Every day they calculate how much food is eaten out of what they make so that for the next meal they know they will have enough for all the kids and they won’t be wasting food.