La Posada dining hall feeds more than students

La Posada, University of New Mexico’s dining hall, composts and donates leftovers at the end of every day after serving roughly 3,500 students. Many UNM students are familiar with La Posada, an on-campus dining hall located near the residence halls. It is a popular place among students for daily meals using a pre-paid meal card. However, serving thousands of students every day, one might wonder where all the food left over at the end of the day goes.

In spite of the number of students served at La Posada, there is a significant amount of food being disposed of daily. Usually, a system like this would create a large amount of food waste that would eventually end up in the growing landfills around the country. La Posada is using a more eco-friendly way to dispose of food waste.

The first step is to use shallow trays and smaller portions in the serving lines at La Posada. This system allows workers to make more food as it is needed, rather than having large portions left over at the end of the day.

Next, students put their used dishes on a conveyor belt that leads to a dishwashing station where compostable food is scraped into large 32-gallon bins before dishes are washed. La Posada fills around four of these bins daily. Soilutions, a food waste collection service, picks up the bins weekly and turns the contents into compost used by farmers, nurseries, landscapers and gardeners.

Soilutions is a New Mexico-based company that strives to return organic material to the New Mexico soil. According to Walter Dods, a Soilutions employee, UNM has been working with the company for about 8 years, and has donated food waste consistently since 2014. In that time, La Posada has donated about 638 tons, Dods said.

In 2019, La Posada and UNM’S Student Union Building, or SUB, have given 78,966.8 pounds of food waste to Soilutions. This equates to 39.5 tons of compost and 131.3 yards of soil improved.

Another way La Posada disposes of food waste is by donating it to homeless shelters through the Food Recovery Network, a national, nonprofit organization that encourages college students to help fight food waste by donating perishable food items from their dining halls to people in need.

Since November 2015, La Posada has donated 5,172 pounds of food to the Food Recovery Network, according to infographics on the walls of the dining hall. This food went on to provide 390 meals

to people in need. La Posada staff feels this work is important because of the large amount of food waste produced daily by students. Even with La Posada’s efforts, students are still throwing away about 80 quarts of food in a two-hour meal period, according to one of the employees in the dining hall June 3. Instead of leaving leftover food on their plate where it can be disposed of properly, they are simply throwing it away. The dining hall is open for three 2-hour periods daily, which adds up to around 240 quarts of food waste a day.

To combat this, staff occasionally put up a display representing the amount of food students are throwing away, the employee said. They believe this helps to put the amount into perspective, and they hope it deters students from throwing away their food.