Creative Educational Display for Food Waste

I've been planning on building a 'living landfill' display out of an old fish tank. That way students can see the layers of a landfill, and it's easy to demonstrate how food waste breaks down anaerobically, contributing to global warming. Feel free to steal the idea. If you do, I want pics!

Best,
Mr. Kelly G. Goyer

Waste Prevention Coordinator
University of Saskatchewan - Facilities Mgmt. Div.
110 Maintenance Road
Saskatoon, Sask. CANADA S7N 5C5
Ph. (306) 966 1282
[email protected]

For our recent TreadLightly EnviroFest in Hobart, we created a Sustainable Cuisine tent which only served locally grown produce (within 100miles, 160km) of the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens (the location for the event). As part of this display we wanted the focus to be on food miles, but also to make a comment on consumption. To highlight how much food our society consumes and wastes, we sought the permission of the Photographer, Peter Menzel to use his images form his publication Hungry World: What the World Eats. These images are copyrighted so it's important to seek permission to use them, but perhaps you have seen them doing the rounds on email. Peter was kind enough to give his permission, and we had these printed onto large outdoor canvasses so people could walk around and have a good look at the images and reflect on how much we consume compared with other cultures. It was very well received and very thought provoking, a powerful statement on unsustainable consumption !

Carinda Rue
Section Head, Sustainability Programs
Dept Environment, Parks, Heritage and the Arts

Not directly responding to your "food waste in canteens" request, but certainly attention-grabbing and gross -- and relevant in the larger context of overconsumption and waste -- are the images of:

1. Danish sculptor Jens Galschit Website: AIDOH (Art In Defence Of Humanism) http://sculptures.aidoh.dk/ notably his 2002 exhibitions Survival of the Fattest - a sculpture about the worlds imbalance A huge fat woman from the West is sitting on the shoulders of starved African man. The 3.5 metres high sculpture epitomizes the imbalanced distribution of the worlds resources, preserved by means of a biased and unjust world trade http://www.aidoh.dk/?categoryID=71 The Hunger March / Hunger Boys http://www.aidoh.dk/?categoryID=53

2. Photographer Chris Jordan Website: http://www.chrisjordan.com/ Some of his image series from Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait Plastic Cups, 2008 Plastic Bottles, 2007 Cans Seurat, 2007 and Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption Chris Jordan's TED presentation (20 minute video) http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/chris_jordan_pictures_some_shocking_stats.html http://www.ted.com/index.php/speakers/chris_jordan.html

3. Other resources that may be useful

Eaten Up
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20378.htm

Raj Patel's book Stuffed and Starved predicted the current global food crisis - spiralling food prices, starvation and obesity. Ed Pilkington meets the soothsayer of agro-economics and talks about what will happen when all the food finally runs out

12 Myths About Hunger http://rehydrate.org/facts/hunger.htm

Who Is Responsible for the World Food Shortage http://www.larouchepub.com/other/1995/2249_food_intro.html Video (20 mins):

Paul Collier: 4 ways to improve the lives of the "bottom billion" http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/paul_collier_shares_4_ways_to_help_the_bottom_billion.html

Best
Nadia

Nadia McLaren
18 Torrens Street,
College Park (Adelaide)
South Australia 5069
+61 (0)8 83 63 46 74
+61 (0)4 34 33 46 74 (mobile)
[email protected]
skype nadia.mclaren

Hello Suzanne,

Have you considered swithching from the "all-you-can-eat" (I know your slogan has "care" in it) to paying for the food by weight? I know this method has been around for a while. Does anybody have insight to food wasted when this alternate variable method of payment is used? As a small eater myself, I have always been aware of the disparity between what the 6'2" guys pile on their plate, and the wonton waste when even they can't eat it all. Gearing up to the switch could certainly include the graphic illustrations of current waste. The fish tank idea with an accompanying chart of pounds of waste per day might make the "care" in your slogan more meaningful. Of course some people will never care, until it hits them in the wallet.

Susan Ryan
Calgary, Alberta

I worked for many years in the food service industry. I can vouch for how much food we waste daily. I often thought it would be great if we could collect it all in separate garbage cans and compost it. If you could get the food service outlets on campus to collect the food waste separately in garbage cans for one day, photograph it and weight it. Then use the photos and numbers in your display. You could even turn it into a campus wide event where for one day everyone uses the garbage cans with red ribbons (or something) for food waste only. Of course, if you do that, you could also try to find someone who would take it at the end of the day and compost it. Maybe then you could get a picture of the campus pile before incorporation into the compost facility.

Claudette Lacombe
www.umbel.ca
[email protected]
403-533-0008

Late to the party here but wanted to post for posterity: I'd be concerned about showing how much is wasted because that's a descriptive social norm of the behaviour you're trying to AVOID. I'd recommend instead showing how much food waste is diverted by composting/avoided by certain practices, demonstrating in a bold infographic type form how many people agree that it's important to reduce food waste, or (if relevant) including information about how many people do a "second helping" type approach.

Also just on the structural level, if others are doing this kind of thing, allowing people to get second helpings would probably help. If you feel like you have to estimate how much you want to eat in one go, you're likely to overestimate. If this is already allowed, perhaps the behaviour to target is "take less than you need, then take seconds if needed".

Teresa Looy
Compost Program Co-ordinator
Green Action Centre
Canada