UConn students chow down on “waste”

University of Connecticut (UConn) Dining Services and the school’s College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources (CAHNR) teamed up Sep. 21 on a complimentary “Tasty Waste” lunch prepared from foods destined for the landfill.

Held from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. and attended by 1,256 UConn students and other community members on a warm, sunny day, the event was designed to show students how much of the food they waste every day can still be put to use.

The meal was part of a program that also included presentations on food waste and sustainability. Among the lessons emphasized was that up to 40 percent of food goes uneaten in the U.S, per the National Resource Defense Council, and the majority of food waste occurs on the consumer end, which means individual choices can make a difference.

Brunswick stew was an entree option because it efficiently used up the variety of meats the kitchen received. Photo: UConn Dining

The menu for the event included apple pear cucumber aqua fresca made with gleaned apples from a local orchard and leftover cucumbers; Southwestern beef chili and Brunswick stew made with frozen meat; Provencal vegetable soup made with excess onions, celery and zucchini; cornbread made from locally gleaned corn; and blueberry bread pudding made from gleaned blueberries and leftover bread from Panera Bread, served with a variety of UConn Dairy Bar ice cream flavors.

The ingredients were donated by local farms, restaurants and markets and consisted of product perfectly safe to eat but destined for the waste stream for a variety of reasons ranging from quality control rejections (ice cream mistakenly made with too few or too many(!) chocolate chips by the manufacturer’s standards, for example) to financial considerations (such as crops left in the field because it would cost the grower too much to harvest them).

Rob Landolphi, culinary operations manager for UConn Dining, was put in charge of planning the event’s menu, which meant essentially dealing with the world’s largest mystery basket.

“Ingredients were coming in from different farms and grocery stores for the last several months, [so] we started blanching off vegetables and freezing them in buckets,” Landolphi recalls. “We [also] froze the bread, while the meat came in [already] frozen and we made stock out of some of the bones and chicken feet and stuff like that. We kept track of what we were getting and how much; then about two weeks ago we sat down and looked at everything on the list. It was kind of like a puzzle.”

The vegetable soup was an easy call as the team had plenty of vegetables to work with, while all the ground beef, tomatillos, corn and tomatoes cried out for chili, but there were a few instances where the team got challenged to be creative.

Dessert was bread pudding made with gleaned blueberries and day-old bread. Photo: UConn Dining

For example, “we ended up having a lot of broccoli and parsley coming in at the last minute, so we did a broccoli-parsley pesto that [we] drizzled on the soup right at the end.”

Another dilemma: What to do with the all the different kinds of meat—from beef, pork and chicken to turkey, lamb and even rabbit—that poured in? Answer: Brunswick stew, which Landolphi says he’s never made before but which turned out to be the perfect solution.

Dessert was made from the day-old Panera bread combined with gleaned blueberries.

“A farm that was at the end of the season told us there were still a few blueberries on each of their bushes and asked if we wanted to come in and glean it,” Landolphi says. “We ended up with 15 to 20 pounds.”

Apples, pears and cucumbers from local farms were processed with a stick blender to make the aqua fresca, a slightly thickened beverage that is a healthy alternative to sweetened juices and sodas.

UConn worked with food recovery organizations like Food Share to gather excess product while students were recruited to glean nearby growing fields. Landolphi stresses that UConn Dining itself contributed no ingredients to the event because the department is scrupulous about avoiding waste.

The idea for Tasty Waste Lunch came from Cameron Faustman, associate dean for academic programs at CAHNR, who was inspired by a recent Feeding the 5,000 lunch at the University of North Carolina.

“We’re trying to bring attention to the breadth of the issue, from how it affects things globally to what you can do in your own fridge,” Faustman said in a release announcing the Tasty Waste event. “All you have to do is change your own behaviors in a small way and it has a big impact.”

“What people have to understand is that when we say ‘food waste’ we’re not talking about food that has gone rancid, we’re not talking about spoiled food, we’re talking about overproduction,” adds Landolphi. “If we can take this food, that again is safe food, and we use it to feed the hungry and things like that, we could really change the way people think in this country.”

Contact Mike Buzalka at [email protected]

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