Sze Wing Yu
Hole Food Rescue
Hole Food Rescue is a nonprofit in Jackson that distributes excess food from grocery stores, bakeries, farms, and several local businesses to organizations serving the at-risk, in-need residents of Teton County, WY. HFR volunteers pick up edible but unsellable products from participating businesses and these foods are sorted and distributed at the HFR headquarters. On average, HFR diverts 5,000 pounds of nutritious food to around a 1,000 in-need residents each week.
This year, HFR began a new project called Just Food JH in order to understand the extent of excess food waste and food insecurity in Teton County. This project will interview a variety of businesses and quantify their edible food waste in order to help them reduce their losses and divert more food to in-need residents. To plan for this project, HFR needed someone who was familiar with research design, which is where I came in.
To help HFR, I researched food waste audits from other municipalities, particularly the Boulder Food Rescue in CO and the FoodSave program in London, England. I helped create and refine the questionnaire given to participating businesses, which include restaurants, hotels, caterers, and grocery stores. The questionnaire helps HFR decide which businesses to partner with and contains questions on the company's background information, current waste stream, and current protocol or potential for food recovery. Next, I researched waste audit protocols and drafted steps and suggested equipment to purchase for HFR's needs. The protocol will take a "snap shot" of how much edible food waste a business generates during its "on-season" with heavy tourism in the Winter and Summer and "off-season" in the Fall and Spring. With a questionnaire ready and ideas for the protocol, HFR plans to begin the research project this coming Winter.
For more information on Hole Food Rescue, click here.
Meal DJ
On campus, I decided to work on the Meal DJ powerpoints. Meal DJing is the role of providing meal information, reinforcing a day's lessons, and facilitating an orderly way to get food for the students. This task is usually done by support staff, who are not teaching a school group that week, and it is their chance to interact with a students they may teach at a later evening program.
I identified a few needs with the Meal DJ system: one, that it does not adequately address why students should aim to have zero ort, or food waste. Here at TSS we encourage students to not waste food, but the concept of sustainability is lost and students focus instead on the number of pounds of ort a meal has generated. To help with this issue, I created a few slides in the Meal DJ powerpoints to explain how one's meal ort transfers to the larger issue of food waste.
Next, with the help of Luke Dauner I also identified issues with the Meal DJ system by surveying my peers who Meal DJ. From their responses and discussions with my faculty project mentors, we decided that a change in the powerpoint slides and future training would be useful. The slides currently have questions that are often multiple choice and place emphasis on students guessing the specific correct answer, without thinking, to get in line as soon as possible for their food. Instead, broader questions that focus on reasoning and using common themes such as the process of Science would allow students to use their creativity in their answers and reinforce what they have already learned. As an experiment, I designed a new set of slides with only photos of landscapes and elk, and asked students broad questions regarding the elk behavior and seasons. The students were able to use their observation skills to point out ecological interactions in the photos, and I was able to give them a few facts about the elk migration.
As for training, it seemed that my peers and I had the idea that Meal DJing was just a task to get students in line at staggered times to avoid mayhem in the dining hall. Paired with the dry powerpoint slides, most of us did not view it as an opportunity to get to know the students and have fun, which is the perception of Meal DJing from the faculty. To give this approach a try, I abandoned the powerpoint slides once and simply asked, "if you had to build a house out of one of the foods on tonight's menu, what would you pick and why?" The answers students gave were surprisingly fun and well-reasoned, and I tagged on questions regarding which Greater Yellowstone Community this house would be in, and hypotheses about what would happen to it in various circumstances. What was more surprising than the detailed answers (enchilada house with soft refried beans as the couches and hard sturdy corn tortilla for the appliances) was that I had fun too! My contributions to this capacity project are powerpoint slides that are more relevant to the students' learning needs, and in the future, training that emphasizes fun and getting to know the students would help Meal DJers better enjoy this role.
I foresee that my new set of slides would be useful for those who are new to Meal DJing, but ultimately an emphasis on getting to know the students and being creative in the role, rather than just doing Meal DJing to get students in line, would benefit the students and the DJs. This project helped identify issues with Meal DJing and would increase scientific literacy by asking questions that would reinforce the students’ applicable scientific skills.