Have you ever eaten a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or a cup of cantaloupe in the cafeteria at lunch? Did you ever wonder where the crusts of the loaf of bread or melon rinds go? This year at United Local those types of kitchen scapes are being fed to local pigs and chickens.
Mrs. Sarah Swope started working in the school cafeteria last year and she noticed a great deal of food waste. She and her husband run a farm on Mountz Road where they raise livestock, vegetables, flowers, and berries. She was upset that so much food was being thrown into the garage.
Our school’s garbage goes to landfills so, instead of adding to the landfills, Mrs. Sope wanted to use the food scraps to feed livestock or turn it into compost for fertilizing gardens. She asked Shaina, the cafeteria director, if it would be OK to bring in buckets for food scraps to be thrown into. Every day, after lunch periods are done, the buckets are taken to the farm. Most days after lunch, the buckets are taken to her farm where the food is fed to livestock. How much is that in a school week? 100 pounds of kitchen scraps a week.
When school started this year, the Swope’s got three American Spotted piglets that weighed about 30 pounds each. They are gilts, or females. There is also a flock of chickens on the farm. Mrs. Swope reports that the chickens love leftover lettuce and they really got a treat when Mrs. Swope took two dented cans of black beans out of the cart that was on its way to the dumpster. The Health Department does not permit food in dented cans to be served because it might not be sealed. Chickens really like black beans and the extra protein from the beans helped the hens to lay eggs even during the cold weather that we had over Christmas break. In fact, the Swopes gather two dozen eggs every day. How many eggs is that in a year? 8760 eggs per day
The piglets are growing fast and enjoying the cafeteria cast-offs. They seem to like just about everything that comes home in the “Pig Buckets” except for rotten oranges! 165 pounds They now weigh about 85 pounds each. How much combined weight have they gained?
Mrs. Swope hopes that eventually there will be a way to collect the food scraps off student trays as well as kitchen scraps. She watches students waste a lot of food that just goes into the garbage. She would like to have some type of composting program that could collect that wasted food and compost it, turning it into valuable fertilizer for gardens and fields. Some areas, like Cleveland, already have programs like this. Rust Belt Riders collects food waste from restaurants, schools, and even homes and turns it into compost that sells for $288 a cubic yard to gardeners and farmers. A cubic yard would fill a space 3 x feet tall, 3x 3=__ feet wide, and 27_ feet deep.
The next time you or your friends throw food away at lunch, think of ways United could recycle it into food for livestock or compost for gardens. If we could do that, it would complete the “recycle triangle" - food scraps becoming a product that grows more food like eggs, bacon, or vegetables.