South Quad serves around 8,000 meals every day. There are more than ten food stations. Burgers, stir fry, a deli counter, a grill; the options are essentially endless, and people move through them quickly. Over the past year, I spent a lot of time in that dining hall and witnessed whole slices of pizza tossed away, half-eaten burgers pushed aside, and salads left untouched. Nobody means to waste food, and we’re all guilty of it at times. Sometimes we’re in a hurry, our eyes are bigger than our stomachs, or we simply feel overwhelmed by the number of options.
As a master’s student at the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability, I spent the past year as a Sustainability Education and Engagement Intern with MDining. South Quad is just one dining hall in a much larger operation. MDining serves over 25,000 meals every day, about 4 million each year, making it one of the largest higher education dining programs in the country. My role was to bring sustainability to life at that scale through student engagement, food waste audits, and campus-wide partnerships.
At every step, I found that people were always at the center, yet most of us often overlook them. My career is devoted to sustainability: developing solutions to pressing issues like climate change, resource depletion, and, in this case, food waste. The most powerful action you can take for a more sustainable food system is to eat with intention. Let me show you how, by walking you through the life cycle of a typical meal.
I will never look at a glass of milk the same
Last summer, I joined a group of MDining staff on a visit to Myers Dairy Farm in Scotts, Michigan. We were warmly greeted by some very cute calves, each curled up in its own pen.
We met the family who owns the farm, and they walked us through the entire process. We watched the cows being milked and saw where that milk is sent. Taking the journey literally, we then drove directly to the Prairie Farms Dairy processing plant and watched milk turn into chocolate milk, caramel lattes, ice cream, and more.
As part of its commitment to sustainable procurement, MDining purchases all its dairy products from Prairie Farms, a local farmer-owned cooperative. I had always understood local procurement as a policy concept, given my academic background. Reduced transportation emissions, localized economic investment, and stronger supply chains. But these concepts became truly meaningful when I watched a family guide us through their dairy operations. Standing on the processing floor an hour later made it all feel real. These are people whose livelihoods depend on the purchasing decisions of institutions like MDining. At 25,000 meals a day, those decisions carry weight.
On another excursion, we visited LaGrasso Brothers, a local, family-owned produce warehouse and major MDining supplier. Walking through their facility, I thought about all the produce that doesn’t make the cut. Fruits are often passed over for being the wrong shape, and vegetables are discarded simply because they don’t meet the aesthetic standards customers expect. Food waste can happen long before a meal is plated. And it happens a lot. A 2021 study found that up to 6 billion pounds of ‘ugly’ produce are wasted annually. By the time a potato or head of lettuce reaches South Quad, it has already survived a selection process most people never see. This realization fundamentally changed how I view an imperfect tomato. It tastes perfectly fine, and it took farmers, land, and water to grow it, so the least I can do is eat it.
We weighed the food you left behind
A significant part of my work at MDining focused on food waste. I helped develop Weigh the Waste, a program that conducts waste audits in the dining halls and uses the data to spark conversations with students. We set up stations, collected measurements, and talked with people about their experiences with food.
Students weren’t indifferent. Many told me they had never really thought about what happens after they throw away their food, not because they didn’t care, but because no one had ever asked them to. This kind of work aims to close that gap.
Food waste is the endpoint of everything that came before it: the water, land, a farmer’s 365-day work year, and the fuel that transported it from field to dining hall kitchen. When a plate goes unfinished, all of that is wasted too.
When food gets thrown away, people go hungry
The Maize and Blue Cupboard (MBC) is the University of Michigan’s on-campus food bank. Anyone with a U-M ID can make an appointment without explanation and take what they need. I volunteered there throughout my internship, and it was one of my favorite parts of the job. I helped unload deliveries and restock shelves with dozens of milk jugs, pounds of fresh cherries, and non-perishable items. Some of this is perfectly good food that, if it weren’t for the MBC, would otherwise have gone to waste. I restocked all of these food items many times, and every time it felt more rewarding than the last.
Food waste and food insecurity are two sides of the same coin. One is abundance mismanaged, the other is unnecessary scarcity. Working at the MBC allowed me to see the equity dimension of food systems, a concept I had understood in theory but not truly felt before. It also taught me that real institutional change depends on relationships. The people I worked with there, especially Kelly, who manages the cupboard, are what make it special.
Waste goes downstream, and people work there too
All waste from U-M’s dining halls, whether it is food or compostable plates and cutlery, has to go somewhere. MDining’s recycling is consolidated and sent to the Materials Recovery Facility, the main processing hub for the University of Michigan’s recyclables. I visited it last summer, and it was a fitting stop. I had spent the previous months thinking about what goes into MDining’s operations, and there I finally saw what comes out the other end.
Working at a recycling facility is dangerous, I learned. Workers spend most of their long shifts manually sorting plastic into different categories. Contamination in a recycling batch poses real health and safety risks for those handling it, beyond the more frequently discussed environmental consequences. I had not considered that before, and I think about it every time I stand in front of a bin now.
Recycling and composting are better than sending waste to landfills, but they are still downstream solutions. They manage waste after it has already been generated. Visiting this facility taught me that the real leverage lies in reducing what ends up there in the first place. This is achievable for all of us, regardless of scale. In 2024, MDining achieved a 58% waste diversion rate, indicating that the infrastructure is already in place.
Whose hands touched this before mine?
I entered this internship already knowing a lot about food systems, but I leave knowing only a handful of the millions of people involved in our food system. Every time I sat down to eat this year, I thought about all the steps in the food cycle, and I encourage you to do the same. Next time you’re in a dining hall, restaurant, or even your own kitchen, pause before you fill your plate. Think about how hungry you are, where your food comes from, and all the resources and people it took to get it to you. You don’t have to do it perfectly; I certainly do not. But even just thinking about it helps you eat with intention, and that makes a difference. I promise, the food will taste different when you know the story!
Thank you to Kenzie for being the most wonderful boss and the whole MDining team. Keith, Kelly at the Maize and Blue Cupboard, everyone at Student Life Sustainability and the Office of Campus Sustainability, and all the students with whom I got to chat about food waste, an issue near and dear to my heart.
Maria is a Sustainability Intern at MDining.