SU dining halls are wasting food. It needs to stop.

It doesn’t sit right with me to be eating in the Brockway Dining Hall with a surplus of food, looking west out the windows over Interstate 81 to a city with one of the highest poverty rates in the U.S. and moderate levels of food insecurity.

Compared to the national average percent of the population living below the poverty line, which was 13.4% in 2021, the city of Syracuse’s was 31.0% in 2019. Tract 42, the neighborhood bordering the west side of campus, has an average per capita income of $8,608 in 2019.

In the center of the city is Syracuse University, where the total cost of attendance for the 2021-22 school year is $80,039.80, nearly 10 times the amount of money average tract 42 residents will see in a year.

Like the tuition at SU, our dining plan’s cost per meal is also very expensive when compared to other institutions. An article published by The Daily Orange compared meal plans from SU and six other comparable schools and found that Syracuse had the most expensive cost per meal at $19.59.

Eating this expensive dining hall food in a city where many struggle to put food on the table leaves me wondering where the leftover dining hall food goes. Yes, SU composts food, but I’m not referring to food scraps. When dining centers close, where does the untouched food go?

In an attempt to answer this question I walked into Sadler Dining Hall with the intent of talking to the manager, but the Food Service employees referred me to the Residential Dining Director, who referred me to the food services website.

When I went to the sustainability section on the site, I discovered the Food Recovery Network. FRN is a national, student-run organization that donates unused food to local social wellness agencies such as homeless shelters, transitional housing organizations, refugee programs, children’s programs and more.

Zander Leff, one of seven e-board members and the current secretary of SU and SUNY-ESF’s branch of FRN, spoke to me to help me better understand where FRN is currently standing. He said that FRN does three to four “food runs” a day, averaging about 20 pounds per trip. During the fall 2021 semester, FRN donated over 5,000 pounds of food, an impressive feat for a student-run organization.

But there is still lots of food being disposed of. And because these volunteers are full-time students in class all day, many of them can’t volunteer their time during the mornings and afternoons, meaning that all breakfast and lunch leftovers likely go to waste.

Assuming that all SU dining halls produce about 20 pounds of food waste per meal, even after FRN saves about 70 pounds per day, the university is still disposing of a total of roughly 230 pounds of food every day across the five dining halls. And that’s not considering all the food that had been set out for students to eat and can no longer be donated because of contamination issues, meaning that, in reality, there’s even more food going to waste.

Leff said that the pandemic has also presented challenges for the FRN. “It just makes everything harder and everyone more reluctant to participate,” he said.
People are more cautious because of COVID-19, and both dining halls and agencies are likely more reluctant to allow students to enter their facilities. It’s frustrating to me that SU can allow the Carrier Dome to operate at full capacity while meeting COVID-19 protocols, yet the university sometimes won’t allow a few more students to enter the kitchens during the evening at times, as Leff said.

Leff added that food collection isn’t the only issue that FRN faces, Leff said. “It’s oftentimes hard to find agencies willing to accept this food,” he said.

In all, the biggest problem lies in the fact that the university isn’t doing enough to support FRN’s efforts. The organization doesn’t even receive a budget from the university, Leff said, and the student volunteers are not only giving their time but all transportation costs are paid for by the volunteers.

Additionally, SU should help by implementing conventions to educate students about the history of Syracuse, promoting FRN to increase participation of volunteers and minimizing the amount of waste generated in the first place by making less food and donating leftovers.

Supporting the organization enough financially to cover the cost of transportation is the bare minimum SU could do. By partnering with FRN, the university could establish connections with agencies in the area and possibly even collaborate with the city to grow this initiative even further. Leff said that the way to waste less food is to expand FRN’s outreach through university support.

“Having only seven students run the whole system hasn’t been the most effective means of communication,” he said, and he added that coupling with the university would create “a more streamlined system with protocols, having a more established mechanism.”

If SU is truly committed to “encompass(ing) all sustainability practices within the classroom and throughout operations at the University,” it must do more to support the organizations that are pulling their weight in the efforts toward a sustainable city.

Owen Hinrichs, Class of 2025