Standing by the conveyor belt in the dining hall whisking away dirty dishes, I watched hordes of Harvard students neglect half eaten sandwiches and spaghetti and meatballs piled high on their trays without second thoughts. In Annenberg Hall, students prioritize fueling their bodies while the dining services prioritize making the experience of eating dinner as efficient as possible. The concept of food waste, however, is on the back burner for most students’ list of immediate concerns. Yet whether we recognize it or not, Harvard University Dining Services (HUDS) work behind the scenes to address waste concerns daily across the University’s dining halls, concealing their initiatives from the majority of students.
In order to avoid disrupting our academic and extracurricular pursuits, Harvard tries to take the responsibility of food waste off of the students, concealing their green initiatives from the students’ eyes. HUDS and the Office for Sustainability aim to inform students of the impact of their actions through sustainability media, but do not force students to be faced with these responsibilities on a daily basis.
The reason, as Assistant Director of the Office for Sustainability David Havelick states, is because students are less inclined to make sustainable decisions if it causes inconvenience to their daily routines. “We don’t want to burden individuals too much when there’s systemic problems to be taken into account and to be solved,” he stated. “When we approach sustainability, we try to be conscious of the other impacts we’re having. This campus is like a testing ground, a living laboratory, where we can try things out and see if we’re missing some unintended consequence.”
Examples of sustainability initiatives Harvard has taken so far include ensuring that all undergraduate dining are Green Certified Restaurants, meaning that their facilities conserve energy, they source from local producers, and compost all excess waste. From farm to plate, Harvard University has seen enormous success with their green initiatives in both combating food waste production and addressing local food insecurity.
Harvard’s Office for Sustainability collaborates with purveyors and student leaders to establish sustainable food standards and reduce waste through composting, menu management, and food donation programs. According to Harvard’s Sustainability Action Plan, minimizing carbon impact from food waste is at the forefront of the University’s priority, yet the prevalence of food waste remains a pressing issue today.
In 2010, the Resource Efficiency Program initiated “Trayless Tuesday Breakfast,” a pilot program in which encouraged students to make more selective decisions about their meals and to reduce food and water waste by removing trays from the dining halls every Tuesday. Yet according to HUDS Executive Director Ted Meyer, the tray deficiency engendered its own set of issues, including an unintentional exclusion of students with disabilities and proctors with small children that require the use of trays. As tray use has continued over the past 13 years, the 2010 effort to get rid of them evidently did not last.
When attempting to maximize their own academic and athletic efficiency, students struggle to prioritize food waste. Nearly 100 billion tons of food waste are thrown away each year—a striking number in regard to the 34 million people in the United States facing food insecurity. While many Harvard students would say they care about climate change and world hunger, their actions—or lack thereof—speak louder than words.
“When it comes to daily actions … I don’t think most people are actively trying to be more sustainable.” said Natalie Weiner ʼ26, who works as a Sustainability Representative for Currier House.
Food waste from campus dining halls fall into two buckets: food that never reaches students’ plates and consumer waste leftover on students’ trays. Although HUDS tracks students’ meal swipes in an attempt to minimize overpreparation of food, HUDS still reports that facilities compost 26,500 pounds of food waste weekly. HUDS weighs and logs leftovers into a menu management system to provide them feedback on how much to produce for future reference. This system is effective, as the most recent HUDS audit estimates that leftover plate waste is less than 2 ounces per person every meal.
Havelick emphasized, “What students do matters. But we can’t put the whole world on every student’s shoulder, right?” He added, “You’re just trying to get a meal on your way to your midterm exam. And so that’s why institutionally, we take responsibility and try to make it easier to make a more sustainable decision.”
With the traditional all-you-can-eat model of most dining halls, HUDS prioritizes preparing more food in anticipation, rather than reaction, to the thousands of students needing to be fed a day.
“People tend to eat with their eyes,” Weiner explained. “It’s better to just start with less and then go back. Because like that, that extra food will be going somewhere.”
In addition to attempting to curb food waste from a production level, HUDS addresses food insecurity by donating trays of salvageable food to the local non-profit Food for Free. Moreover, the Food Literacy Project’s Heat and Eats program recruits volunteers to portion individual, microwavable meals for local families. Their salvageable food donations equate to more than 45,000 meals per year. Not only does Heat and Eats recover untouched food from the dining hall to people experiencing homelessness, but it also raises student awareness about how they can give back to the local community. This initiative is spreading to other vendors at the Harvard Business School and the Kennedy School.
Jack Towers ’25, a former student coordinator for Harvard Undergraduates for Environmental Justice comments on the success of the University’s food distribution programs. He states, “it is an admirable example of how there is concrete action taken to think about food waste and then maintain the life cycle, however possible.”
Amongst the doom and gloom of dire climate warming and rising food insecurity in America, Harvard prioritizes the issue on both an internal and policy level. Weiner said “there are a lot of different committees and task forces that are made up of students, faculty members, and alumni who are all focused on addressing this issue in relation to the university.”
With $200 million dollars invested into Harvard’s Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability, and a new sustainability plan for healthful and sustainable food spearheaded by the Office for Sustainability, Harvard is modeling a pathway for sustainable development that other Universities follow. As one of the first universities to sign onto the Cool Food Pledge, Harvard led the charge to reduce food related greenhouse gas emissions by 25% by 2030. The mayor of New York cited Harvard as a reason they signed on, with New York University soon to follow suit.
“We want to help people match their values with their actions,” Lauren Bloomberg, the Sustainability Manager at the Office of Sustainability, said in an interview with the Harvard Independent. Although Harvard is a living laboratory to pilot solutions, the institutional initiatives are unavailing without cooperation and mobilization from students. Reflecting on his work with the Climate Coalition, Towers stated, “We act almost like an accountability mechanism for, you know, actually seeing those goals achieved.”
The future of fighting food waste is in our hands, and luckily Harvard is determined to tackle new challenges in regard to sustainability.
Ellie Tunnell ʼ27 (ellie_tunnell@college.harvard.edu) eats from a salad bowl everyday in Annenberg.