What a Waste

The new school year is in session and promises to be interesting (as in, “may you live in interesting times”). My school participates in the national free and reduced-price lunch and breakfast programs administered by the USDA.

In simple terms, the USDA will reimburse the school up to a certain amount per student who qualifies for the program. Since the vast majority of our students qualify, our whole district receives the maximum reimbursement from the USDA. If memory works as a guide, that comes out to about $2 per student for breakfast and about $3 per student for lunch, or about $5 per student per day. In order to reduce staffing costs in the cafeteria, breakfast is delivered and served in the classroom, but lunch is served cafeteria style in the cafeteria.

I had forgotten something important in my car the other morning, so I took advantage of an assembly to pop out and retrieve it. This just happened to be right after we finished clearing away the breakfast stuff and I was shocked at what was going into the dumpsters. Hundreds of dollars of unopened/unused food items just headed for the local landfill.

This was done for food safety reasons, as far as I can tell. Not being anything even remotely resembling a certified nutritionist, chef or food service manager, my take on this is decidedly uninformed, so keep that in mind. If I understand correctly, those little 8-oz. milk cartons have to be kept at or below a certain temperature until they are served. Once they are pulled out of the refrigerator, of course, they begin to warm up to whatever the ambient temperature is (at this time of year, that would be “hot”, air conditioning notwithstanding). If they cross that temperature threshold, they must be thrown out. I suspect that the same is true of fresh fruit and most especially true for hot food such as pancakes, sausage and the rest. No one wants recycled breakfast burritos, I’m sure.

The USDA requirement is that in order to qualify for reimbursement under the program, the meal must be served to the student. My students are required to take one of each item. If they don’t want the item after it has been given to them, they are welcome to give it to another student and I’ll snag the occasional uneaten apple or something before it hits the trashcan. But unwanted items typically just go into the trash and from there to the local landfill. So take that $2 (for breakfast), multiply it by several hundred students, times 180 school days and we’re talking close to $100,000 per year going to the landfill. And that’s just from my school. According to the USDA, 11.1 million students were being served in this program in the 2009-2010 school year, at a cost of $2.9 billion. It’s undoubted near or higher than that number for this school year. You can roughly triple those numbers for the school lunch program.

I am not faulting the USDA for this waste. Whether the program is necessary on this scale is probably the subject of much debate and I don’t have enough information to have an informed opinion one way or the other. For the time being, I’ll simply accept that it is necessary and proceed from there.

I am not faulting the school or the district. They are doing precisely what is required by the USDA and I’m relatively sure that our cafeteria could not operate without the program. Lizards, rattlesnakes, tumbleweeds and cacti aren’t real good about paying their property taxes, so local revenue sources are pretty slim and we’ll take any help we can get to defray any expense we can.

I am not even faulting the students. If they don’t want something, it’s not my place to shove it down their throats. If childhood obesity is the problem that everyone claims it is, then forcing a child to take in calories that they don’t want seems counter-productive.

But there is something out of kilter when every piece of the government is screaming about not having enough money to <insert function here> and we’re literally sending billions per year to the landfill. Some of it is inevitable. There honestly isn’t much else you can do with half of a burrito or a third of a salad. But we might start with a bit of common sense. Anyone in your household suffered from food poisoning due to an apple or banana being at room temperature for a couple of days or the milk warming a little on its way home from the grocery store? And while you’re thinking about that, consider what else your local school could do with the money that they’re having to send to the dump.

This entry was posted on Saturday, 27 August 2011 at 17:47 and is filed under Education, Carthago delenda est, Whatever. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.