How Indiana Schools Prevent Food Waste and Feed More Students

What happens to all the leftover food? Typically, it’s thrown away.

When school cafeterias make breakfast and lunch for students, over-preparation is the order of the day. It’s impossible to know exactly how many students will be getting a meal on any given day, and it’s better to make too much and have leftovers than not to make enough and have hungry students.

As a result, there is a lot of food waste at the end of the day. Considering there are students who go hungry on the weekends, its a massive problem. According to aPost, Elkhart Community Schools has found a workable solution to kill two birds with one stone.

Frozen Meals, Full Bellies

Elkhart Community Schools, located in northern Indiana, partnered with Cultivate Culinary (a nonprofit focused on distributing over-prepared food) to put their leftover food into the right hands. What the organization has been doing is taking food that was prepared, but never served, and turning it into frozen meals. Eligible students (typically those who also qualify for free school meals) will receive 8 frozen meals for home on Friday, to help last them through the weekend and to fill in any other gaps throughout the week.

So far, the program has been a resounding success, and it’s helped both to curb food waste and to help ensure meals for students and families in need. Not only that, but because the food is located, saved, and picked up at a local school, it solves the distribution problem that often plagues food distribution efforts (as the students are already there). While something of a pilot program, implementing this on a far broader scale could lead to a massive cut in food waste across the nation, as well as severely reducing food insecurity.