Building a student chapter — relationships matter

When we first considered activating a Food Recovery Network (FRN) chapter at Mount Holyoke College (MHC), my friends and I weren’t sure whether our school qualified. With one centralized dining hall keeping careful track of pre-consumer recoverable kitchen scraps, we discovered that the majority of food waste came from post-consumer scraps — food that students took onto their plates and threw away at the end of a meal.

This problem statement caused us to hesitate. After all, if we didn’t have food available for recovery, was our school eligible to be part of the national FRN? Through many conversations with dining staff, school policy decision-makers and other students, each of our questions only led to another open question mark. Would we target policy to create choice structures that would guide student food decisions? Should we aim for the education track, where students might be more open to learning about food equity from another student? We considered running Weigh the Waste events to raise awareness, planning community events to encourage longevity and forming partnerships with other environmental groups on campus. In the end, we realized there was no straightforward path — our FRN chapter would just have to take it one step at a time, involving as many stakeholders as possible. Progress would be slower than we had hoped, but it also meant we would build a foundation of trust and commitment for sustained change on campus.

What followed was the most fruitful semester of my college experience. We built our FRN chapter through relationships, wading together through the gnarls of the campus food experience to identify three main arms: policy, education and composting.

• Co-founder Zainab created an educational food waste module for the first-year seminars — mandatory for all new students.
• Our chapter’s other co-leader, Maya, researched composting opportunities with MHC’s on-campus horse stables and outlined a blueprint for centralized raised bed gardens.
• Throughout the semester, MHC FRN hosted three Weigh the Waste events. During these, we collected data on the flow of the lunch rush and students’ reasons for leftover food, which I used to support my policy proposal for an alternative meal plan option.
• My published piece for the school newspaper brought attention to our role as students within a larger food ecosystem and the central role care plays in decreasing post-consumer food waste.
• Halfway through the semester, MHC’s FRN chapter partnered with our school’s environmental center as well as other climate justice organizations on campus to host Dining Hall Appreciation Week. During that week, we posted informational signage, led a social media campaign on food waste and tabled outside the dining hall to create posters in appreciation of our dining staff.

The connective thread through our actions was our commitment to campus stakeholders — students, dining staff, academics and groundskeeping staff alike. Since the physical act of food recovery was not feasible at our school, we found alternative ways to contribute to our community’s food experience. Even at campuses where food recovery is the most pressing path forward, there are possibilities for other nodes of connection, beginning with continuous and diverse stakeholder conversation. Importantly, food recovery itself extends beyond the physical act into possibilities for community care. When we, as a society, understand food recovery as part of our shared reality, in what other ways can we reimagine our collective food experience?

This piece was previously published on the Food Recovery Network’s blog.