I worked on a multi-year project to begin a waste diversion station in a local middle school cafeteria. We set up a sorting station (trash, compost, recycle, and foods that can be donated) in the cafeteria, and worked with the school administration, teachers, and parents, to help students sort their waste for a month in May 2019 during lunchtime.
Habits take a long time to change, and behavior takes a long time to shift. Our environment can influence us in many ways, and even if the students were used to composting at home, or in another class, the flow of the cafeteria and the social environment during lunchtime is unique. This is intriguing to me, as a Sociology/Anthropology major. I saw the students’ mindset change from simple curiosity or even mild interest, to an almost habitual action of trash sorting, in the time span of a week. Although parent volunteers were needed for the entire month to instruct and help the students with sorting, it was inspiring to me that many of the students were comfortable with sorting their waste after a few days.
This project also began a thinking process for me about what waste is (or isn’t) for an individual and for a group of people or a certain culture. Why is one thing healthy and nutritious and beneficial to us, and then the second it gets thrown into a bag or a bin, it is gross and useless? Why do some foods end up in the compost and others are eaten? Does that vary between individuals or are there patterns in what the students eat versus what they don’t? Why do we not consume what is served to us and do we think about what happens to it when we throw it away? How do the nutrition guidelines for lunch influence what gets thrown in the compost? Do we consider the resources that went into the food that we eat and the food that we throw away?
This entire experience brought me to realize that, in order to understand food from start to finish, sustainability, environmental health, and human health all need to be considered. However, because these are all interconnected and depend on each other, so it’s more of a cycle than a straight line from start to finish. This could be said about almost any system, if you take a sustainable approach. Being able to experience this on a personal, and academic level will help me continue this approach in the future, regardless of the systems I am studying. Asking critical and broad questions can allow us to branch out and better understand the systems we are working on and how they fit into our world.
