University joins food-waste recovery movement

SEATTLE — Daniel Noteboom grew up learning the importance of cleaning his plate and finishing what he took. Now, at 22 years old, he finds waste and inefficiency endlessly bothersome, and he’s doing something about it.

Noteboom, a UW senior, has partnered with fellow students Maryann Olson and Diane Bolme to bring a chapter of the national Food Recovery Network (FRN) to the UW.

Originally founded in 2011 at the University of Maryland, FRN seeks to simultaneously reduce food waste and feed hungry Americans nationwide by donating surplus food from college dining halls and surrounding restaurants to shelters for the needy. With chapters at more than 140 college campuses across 35 states, FRN has recovered more than 800,000 pounds of food from landfills to date.

This quarter, thanks to Noteboom and his colleagues, FRN has made its way onto the UW’s constantly expanding list of registered student organizations (RSOs), where it hopes to become one solution to the problem of wasted food.

The magnitude of food waste

After reading the 2012 Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) report, “Wasted: How America Is Losing Up to 40 Percent of Its Food from Farm to Fork to Landfill,” Noteboom was both shocked and inspired by the data on wasted food, and FRN became the answer to doing his part.

“I started seeing the wasted food everywhere,” Noteboom said. “At every step in the chain [of production] there’s waste, but people aren’t really aware.”

According to the NRDC report, nearly 40 percent of food in the United States goes uneaten each year, or $165 billion worth. Food production, which in 2012 composed 10 percent of the total U.S. energy budget and sprawled across half of U.S. land, has become not only economically wasteful, but environmentally harmful as well.

Uneaten food is the single largest chunk of the United States’ municipal solid waste, the NRDC report says, meaning it decomposes in landfills and contributes heavily to the country’s methane emissions. But it’s not just about the food, Noteboom said, because food waste is intimately connected to all sorts of environmental problems.

“When there is a drought like the one in California now, people are told to take shorter showers and do small things in the home to reduce water consumption,” Noteboom said. “But more water goes to food production than municipal use, and if we’re throwing away almost half of our food, we’re throwing away the water supply.”

Indeed, 80 percent of U.S. freshwater consumption is attributed to food production, according to the NRDC report. Reducing the amount of food wasted nationwide would reduce frivolous water waste, Noteboom emphasized, and help alleviate the effects of environmental problems like droughts.

“It’s not a matter of lack of solutions,” Noteboom said. “It’s knowledge of the problem.”

The recovery effort

Having only recently formed as an RSO on campus, FRN UW is still a small effort. Noteboom, Olson, and Bolme are currently the only members, and just two restaurants, Panera Bread and Canlis, are participating in food donations.

The FRN team does three pickups from Panera and Canlis each week, rescuing anywhere from 30 to 150 pounds of food at a time. The food is taken to two places currently, Angeline’s Women’s Shelter and Union Gospel Mission downtown, where it is used to make nutritious meals for the needy.

“The food is packed up late at night, so there’s little interaction with the people we’re actually helping,” Noteboom said. “Still though, it can be fun taking such nice food to people who have so little.”

As of now, the team is limited only by the number of members and their various time commitments. Getting the club started was hard work itself, Noteboom said, but now that FRN is here, his team will begin tabling, holding regular meetings, and starting the overall outreach and awareness efforts.