Take All You Care to Eat

By Broadside Correspondent Yasmin Tadjdeh

Last week, Dining Services began their campaign to end wasteful student eating habits in Southside. Since Southside’s opening in October 2008, staff have noticed an increase in the amount of students taking too much to eat and throwing the excess away, as well as stealing food from the dine-in only restaurant.

According to Sodexo, the facility serves around 2,400 people per day and every month, hundreds of pounds of food are thrown into the garbage.

Through a series of posters and word-of-mouth campaigning, Sodexo hopes to get the message out that while eating at Southside, students should only take as much as they can eat and, additionally, not remove food from the building.

Betty Abebe, a sophomore nursing major, said when she eats at Southside, she sometimes sees people taking too much food or removing it from the building.
Freshman business major Jun Zhang said, “I see people take fruit, like apples and bananas, out a lot.”

On a monthly basis, Southside goes through thousands of pounds of produce. The dining facility uses 2,800 pounds of bananas, 2,500 pounds of apples, 1,600 pounds of oranges and 2,650 pounds of tomatoes every month.

The waste of food at Southside raises food costs. On top of the economic loss, the amount of food wasted could easily feed dozens of people.

A problem the campaign is addressing is students removing food from Southside, which is against its policy.

“Come and eat as much as you like—it’s an all-you-care-to-eat dining facility—but don’t take it out as well,” said Denise Ammaccapane, regional district manager of Sodexo.

According to Ammaccapane, whenever students take food out of the building or throw away uneaten food, they inadvertently raise food costs which in turn raises the price of meal plans, door price and tuition, which hurts everyone who attends Mason.

Zhang, who has seen the rise in cost of meal plans, said that it is wrong of people to remove food and waste it. “It’s not fair to people who don’t waste food and follow the rules.”

All food that is thrown away at Southside goes into The Pulper. The Pulper is a machine that Southside uses to help them on their journey to produce zero percent waste. The Pulper churns food waste—both scraps from students’ meals and waste from peelings and meat trimmings from the kitchen—into pulp. Every three weeks, nine tons of this pulp are taken to a composting yard in Maryland. All plastics used in Southside are recycled.