Sustainability: Food Services Staff Work Hard to Minimize Waste

For many years, Bexley Schools’ Food Services staff have worked hard to integrate sustainability into its operations, while supporting local initiatives along the way.

When Food Services Director Julianna Carvi began in Bexley Schools in August 2013, one of the first things she did was change the focus of the operation. She said the district became an “offering district,” rather than a “serving district”  ̶  rather than serving students a whole plate of food, they offer students food options and allow them to take what they will eat.

An extension of this approach is the daily salad bar option. “If students don’t want mushy peas, they can go to the salad bar and get carrot sticks instead,” she explained. The Cassingham Complex operation also offers students a “share table,” where students may put whatever food item is unopened on the share table for another student to take.

The department also moved away from Styrofoam products a few years ago in favor of using biodegradable pressed-fiber food trays for middle and high school students. Elementary students’ meals are served on washable 5-compartment trays. Those trays were purchased about nine years ago after the Bexley Education Foundation awarded a grant to the Food Services Department to help it move into sustainable practices. The 5-compartment trays are lightweight and designed to stack in a dishwasher two by two, thus taking half the water to wash.

Two local efforts also benefit from the Food Services’ commitment to sustainability.

For years, the district has donated leftover food to Columbus Food Rescue. Each day in the Cassingham kitchen whatever leftover food that is edible but not sellable is packaged and frozen. Then every Friday Spike Tyler, a local volunteer who works with Columbus Food Rescue, picks up the frozen leftovers and helps deliver them to homeless shelters or others who are food insecure. The organization is a program of the Local Matters partnership whose mission is to fight food waste and food inequity by redistributing food to those in need. In addition to cafeterias like Bexley’s, restaurants and other food-serving organizations take part.

Secondly, “chicken buckets” are a big component of the staff’s sustainability efforts. Each day, members of the Cassingham kitchen staff cut, slice, and dice vegetables for the popular lunchtime salad bar, peel potatoes when they’re on the menu, and chop vegetables for use in many scratch-made lunch items. Food scraps, like romaine cores or other vegetable scraps, are put into 5-gallon buckets and stored in their walk-in cooler. Once a week, former Bexley High School science teacher Josh Butcher picks up all of the scraps – typically at least eight buckets – and drops off clean buckets for the next week. He uses the scraps to feed chickens. He also does outreach with Cassingham Elementary, sharing information about farming and his connection to the district’s Food Service program. 

Ms. Carvi said they regularly remediate 40-50 gallons of food waste via the chicken buckets, keeping all of that waste from landfills and directing it to animal feed, which, she said, is the second best use of food, better than composting. 

Most of these sustainability efforts are central to the Cassingham Complex Food Services operation, because of volume served and capacity. At Maryland and Montrose, Ms. Carvi explained, students preorder their meals each morning, so staff make the amount needed with only one or two servings extra for the times when a student accidentally drops their food. 

In considering the sum of everything they do to work toward sustainability, Ms. Carvi said, “I think we’re doing a pretty good job of keeping food waste out of landfills. And we would happily do more if the opportunity arises.”