As fall serves up a fresh new school year for Kamehameha’s students, ‘Akahi Dining Hall steps up to the plate with its trays, cups, and silverware. ‘Akahi has implemented its in-hall clean-up system, in which students discard their leftovers into bins before leaving. This “dine-in” eating has helped to visualize food waste and portioning as leftover bins fill up at the end of the lunch block.
According to commercial food waste prevention tech company Leanpath, as much as 60% of a location’s food waste comes from post-consumer waste. Sophomore Brennan Agcaoili provides some mana’o on the issue, hypothesizing that “students are so used to having takeout containers that they grab too much on their dine-in plates and end up dumping so much because they don’t have the time to graze on their food throughout the day.” Displayed on the wall near the waste station, signs inform students about their waste, one of which reveals that in 2016, each student wasted an average of 0.17 pounds of food daily, highlighting the lengthy history of the problem. PE teacher Gail Murakami suggests that to reduce waste and also maintain a balanced nutritional diet, students should follow a hand portioning method, with two handfuls of vegetables, a fist-worth of carbohydrates, and a cupped hand of protein.
As ‘Akahi moves forward with its dine-in food service program, the visible volume of food waste will help to display discarded food to students and their appetites to reduce their own footprint in the wastebin.
Works Cited:
Leanpath. “Preventing Food Waste at the Buffet; A Guide for Chefs and Managers.” www.leanpath.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/WP_BuffetFoodWaste_US_EN.pdf, Leanpath, 2023
