Custom-made plates of food sit out at Traditions at Scott’s Mongolian Grill. Credit: Faith Schneider | Lantern Photographer

The all-you-care-to-eat dining hall is one of the most common elements of the American college experience.

For many Ohio State students, it takes just a single swipe of a BuckID, and a seemingly endless supply of food appears. Trays upon trays of various menu items come into view, offering everything from a custom salad bar to tacos and churros, all the way to a self-serve ice cream station — free for the taking.

From the early hours of the morning until well into the evening, these trays are constantly replenished, so no student is left wanting without their favorite meal. Second, third and fourth helpings turn all-you-care-to-eat into all-you-can-eat in the blink of an eye.

In catering to over 60,000 students, Ohio State’s Dining Services goes through a massive amount of food to ensure visitors are well-fed on a day-to-day basis.

But at the end of the day, when the dining hall is quiet and the last student shuffles out, the thought of how much food remains becomes hard to ignore.

Until recently, there were no concrete answers. Ohio State is not required by law to track how much food is discarded, and dining locations across campus individually decide how to track how much food isn’t consumed.

Abby Hertzfeld, senior director of Dining Services at Ohio State, said for the last several years, the data regarding the university’s food waste “wasn’t very consistent” and “[was] all over the board.” Starting in 2024, however, Ohio State implemented a system that creates a consistent foundation for tracking and reporting numbers across all dining locations.

“Through the process of time, we’ve kind of [gotten] a little better at making data-driven decisions in the department,” Hertzfeld said. “This just seemed like the next real logical step.”

The first rounds of data from this tracking system may not demonstrate the full breadth of food waste at Ohio State, but they do offer some preliminary insights into just how much food is dumped by some of the school’s most popular dining locations

Traditions at Scott was voted the best on-campus dining location for the 2023-24 academic year, according to The Lantern’s 2023 “Best of OSU” polling. This location, along with Union Market, was one of the first two eateries to begin piloting the new waste-tracking program.

Between July 9, 2024, and Feb. 20, Traditions at Scott discarded over 32,750 pounds of food, totaling roughly 4,700 pounds of food per month.

The most discarded food item during this period was scrambled eggs, coming in with a grand total of more than 850 pounds thrown out in the seven-month period. The least-wasted food item was sliced, fresh jalapeno peppers, amounting to less than one-tenth of a pound discarded within the same time frame.

Union Market puts up a smaller amount of food waste, totaling over 12,500 pounds across the same period of time. Their most wasted food item was Whitey’s Beef Chili, with over 780 pounds thrown away, and their least wasted was the power green salad, with just 0.5 pounds discarded.

Credit: Reid Murray | Managing Editor for Design

Credit: Reid Murray | Managing Editor for Design

According to the United States Department of Agriculture, food loss is defined as “the edible amount of food, postharvest, that is available for human consumption but is not consumed for any reason.” Some organizations use the term “food waste” to include non-edible parts of food, such as eggshells, fruit rinds and bones.

Food waste is a prominent issue that many student organizations attempt to tackle while striving for a more sustainable future. KNOW Food Waste is one such group at Ohio State.

Laura Castellanos-Suarez, a third-year PhD student studying food science and technology and member of the KNOW club, said this club aims to encourage students to think more about the environment and how they can practice clean living.

“A lot of things in my life have inspired me to have a sustainable life,” Castellanos-Suarez said. “That generates a lot of [benefits] for the planet right now. I want to promote [those kinds] of ideas.”

A plate is placed in the Traditions at Scott dishwashing conveyor belt system. Credit: Faith Schneider | Lantern Photographer

According to the university’s Sustainability Institute, “one of Ohio State’s most ambitious goals is to achieve zero waste by 2025 by diverting 90% of waste away from landfills.” As of now, the university has a landfill waste diversion rate of 41%, the institute’s website states.

One of these “Zero Waste” initiatives is the reusable container program, which was implemented in fall 2023 and required all to-go orders from the Traditions dining locations to use reusable containers.

This initiative diverted 248,000 disposable containers from going to landfills in the last academic year alone, said Molly Kathleen, manager of the Zero Waste program.

Hertzfeld said it was the reusable container program that inspired Dining Services to seek out more comprehensive, cohesive data concerning campus food waste.

“It made us hungry for more data and more actual numbers regarding food waste,” Hertzfeld said.

In June 2024, Ohio State began beta testing the StreamLine food waste tracking system from Topanga — an enterprise food-service technology company — at the Traditions at Scott and Union Market dining locations. The StreamLine system was subsequently introduced into Sloopy’s Diner, Traditions at Kennedy and Traditions at Morrill over this year’s spring break.

StreamLine uses an AI-powered recognition system and a scale to keep a consistent log of food waste, according to its website.

Dining Services staff place the pan of food to be discarded on the scale, and a camera above the scale recognizes the type and size of the pan, as well as the menu item inside, Hertzfeld said. The scale then calculates the gross weight of the pan and its contents, and StreamLine subtracts the weight of the pan without any contents in it. This produces the net weight, which is then automatically logged, according to StreamLine’s website.

One of the key benefits of using StreamLine, Hertzfeld said, is getting an accurate understanding of food waste costs.

“The way we were doing it before, if we ever got to the point where we inputted the information into the system and got an actual cost, it was usually a week or two, or at the end of the semester, or it was very random, and the cost we were getting weren’t necessarily in the moment,” Hertzfeld said. “This system has really allowed us to communicate more transparently with our team on a real-time, daily basis.”

Beyond simply “going bad,” there are several reasons why food is disposed of. More specifically, the Ohio Department of Health sets rules to ensure food being consumed by patrons in dining facilities is safe to eat.

In the data acquired by The Lantern, only two dining locations — Traditions at Morrill and Kennedy — tracked the reasons why food was being tossed out. For any given item, one of three reasons was provided: overproduction, expired product or quality issue.

For Morrill and Kennedy, the top reason for food being discarded was overproduction, followed by expired product and then quality issues.

Fruit is made available on shelves at Traditions at Scott. Credit: Faith Schneider | Lantern Photographer

Temperature-controlled food, on the other hand, has more flexibility in terms of use — so long as the food remains in the temperature range as set by the health department, Hertzfeld said.

“Let’s say we overproduce some grilled chicken breast; as long as we have all the temperature controls, then we can blast chill that chicken down to the right temperature within the correct amount of time,” Hertzfeld said. “Then you cut that chicken up and use it as cold chicken on the salad bar, or use it in chicken salad or do something else with it.”

Items that are temperature-controlled can also be donated, so long as they have not been self-served by patrons at the dining halls, Hertzfeld said.

Ohio State’s Dining Services is connected with several food banks, such as the Mid-Ohio Food Bank and the Food Recovery Network, where they are able to donate pre-consumer food, Hertzfeld said.

Though it’s certainly a good sign the university is getting better at consistently tracking food waste, there’s still lingering confusion about where the food ends up if it doesn’t go to the landfill.

As of now, Ohio State has a few different options for diverting food waste that go beyond throwing it in the dumpster, including a food digester, a pulping system and composting efforts.

Food digesters and pulping systems both involve breaking down food scraps into gray water and pulp, respectively.

Gray water can be repurposed for irrigation or, when properly treated, toilet water. The slurry created from the pulping mechanism is sent into the sewage system, keeping food scraps away from the landfill.

In addition to increasing campus sustainability, Hertzfeld said another motivation for using alternative waste methods is removing strain from existing waste management systems.

“Food scraps are obviously very heavy, they’re very wet, all of those things,” Hertzfeld said. “Our trash-collecting folks do not enjoy having all that extra heavy, wet food debris in their system.”

Plates sit on the dishwashing conveyor belt system at Traditions at Scott. Credit: Faith Schneider | Lantern Photographer

The primary reason that minimizing food waste is at the forefront of many sustainability efforts is due to how waste has been proven to show adverse effects on the environment.

Notably, an October 2023 report from the Environmental Protection Agency found 58% of methane emissions from municipal solid waste landfills come from landfilled food waste.

Some organizations strive to hold restaurants accountable for the food waste they contribute to this environmental pollution. One such example is the Green Restaurant Association, which creates standards that dining facilities must meet to become a “Certified Green Restaurant.”

There are eight categories that each standard falls under, including a “waste” category, according to the Green Restaurant Association website. For food waste specifically, the Green Restaurant Association has a myriad of goals the restaurants aiming for the green certification should strive to achieve, including reusing uneaten food as animal feed and having an onsite composting program.

Michael Oshman, CEO of the Green Restaurant Association, said “every single thing” that a restaurant does is an important part of running an environmentally sustainable business. Food waste, however, plays an exceptionally key role.

“The average restaurant wastes around 100,000 pounds on an annual basis,” Oshman said. “I don’t necessarily recommend it, but if you go dumpster diving and you look at your favorite restaurant, you’ll probably find a good half, depending on the restaurant, is food.”

On a larger scale, one-third of all food production ends up going to waste, Castellano-Suarez said. According to the National Resources Defense Council website, U.S. restaurants have collectively produced 22 to 33 billion pounds of food waste every year as of 2017.