food4VOLS collects food, prepares free meals for campus: ‘The hub for food donation and collection on campus’

Keenan Thomas, Senior Staff Writer

April 6, 2022

The Big Orange Pantry provides free and discounted meals for students.

For those who are unsure of where to get their next meal, food4VOLS provides free, ready to heat and eat meals at the Big Orange Pantry.

Started in Aug. 2021, food4VOLS is a program that aims to fight food insecurity and redistribute food waste on campus. Every meal they prepare is pre-cooked and ready to eat for any student, faculty or staff member on campus. Anyone can come and grab a meal through the Big Orange Pantry located in Greve Hall.

Program manager at the Culinary Institute Tyler White oversees food4VOLS. He summarized what the program does.

“We’re more manufacturing,” White said. “We collect unused food on campus. We bring it back to the Culinary Institute. We transform and prepare ready-to-heat and ready-to-eat meals — they’re all in microwavable containers — and then we take them to Big Orange Pantry.”

The program worked with Vol Dining, Americorps Vista Members and the Office of Sustainability to get it started. Recent research from the university has found that one out of three college students will experience food insecurity at least once throughout the semester.

During an unrelated meeting, White began to discuss this issue with sustainability manager Jay Price. At the end of the meeting, the program began to formulate until they formally started in the fall 2021 semester. It’s only grown since then.

“We went from about 50 meals to now we’re up to about 150 meals a day that we’re preparing and sending to Big Orange Pantry,” White said. “We’re hoping to increase that now that Big Orange Pantry has increased their space as well.”

The program works by collecting unused food from Vol Dining, Aramark restaurants and events on campus each day. They take the excess, cooked and properly stored food to the Culinary Institute where they document what they’ve obtained and refrigerate it.

The next day, they take the ingredients that they have, determine if it needs anything else along with it like sauces and prepare a meal using those ingredients, which are labeled on a sticker on the container. After taking them to Big Orange Pantry, they deliver some to local non-profit organizations and prepare to do it all again.

“It’s one big rotation,” White said. “We come in, we see what we’ve collected, we try and have a game plan.”

This sometimes might include what students cook in culinary classes. For example, White recently used excess eggs from one of his classes along with recovered biscuits, cheese and bacon to make breakfast sandwiches for that day’s meals.

Although the specific meals aren’t pre-planned, they try to take into consideration upcoming events, holidays, preferences and allergens so that they can include everyone. White mentioned that they will prepare pescatarian meals for Fridays because of Lent.

“We try to take into consideration what’s going on nationally with religions and things like that that we can help with,” White said. “So we make sure that we try and do that. We make sure that we have gluten free options, some vegetarian options.”

Through these meals, food4VOLS has diverted several tons of food waste.

“The amount we’ve done this semester — we’ll look from Feb. 2022 till … the end of March — I think it’s been close to 5,000 pounds that has been diverted from compost or the landfill to here that then went to feeding.”

Last semester, they diverted four times as much into meals, totaling around 20,000 pounds of potential food waste. According to the Earth Day Initiative, one pound of food waste is equivalent to 3.8 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions. In other words, around 78,000 pounds of potential greenhouse gasses was diverted by food4VOLS and food collection on campus in their meal preparation.

About 7,000 to 10,000 pounds of that food collecting came from the help of social impact coordinator at the Office of Sustainability Deborah Bethel. She worked with volunteers with the Food Recovery Network to collect unused food from the Sky Boxes after football games. She said that it was one of the smoothest recovering processes that they’ve had after games, according to those that she worked with.

“It was a pretty simple process really after we got into the swing of things with the volunteers who came almost every single game,” Bethel said. “And it was incredible too to see, I think we had recovered around seven tons of food.”

She discussed the amount of diverted food from last semester.

“It’s astronomical,” Bethel said. “It’s something honestly that before I was involved in this program, I didn’t think too too much about, because I personally would take leftover food home and eat it there, but I didn’t think about the background food that’s not being used.”

The food that Bethel would collect came from the Sky Boxes. This food is cooked and ready to serve during games, but most of the time either never leaves their packaging or sits in the hot boxes waiting to be used.

Along with the collecting, Bethel talked about the composting efforts on campus. Most of the unrecoverable food gets taken to the composting facility, which is able to process substances like meat unlike other facilities in town.

“At least we do have that,” Bethel said. “That makes it hard to know what the emissions diverted are. But, if the food were to go to a landfill and rot, that’s just so much methane created.”

As of now, the only place to get these meals comes from Big Orange Pantry. They hope to continue offering more meals as the pantry expands, while also having an option for students who can’t get a meal during their operating hours. White has an idea for how he would like to tackle some of the food deserts on campus, especially for those that are on campus late at night.

“Our goal and hope is that with food deserts on campus, where some of the Vol Dining locations close at lunch time and they’re not open later, that we can create some kind of free vending machine where a student can access a free meal whenever they need to, because food insecurity doesn’t happen between 12 p.m. and 5 p.m.,” White said.

Along with the vending machine idea on campus, White talked about helping out the local community as well. They already take some of their extra meals and deliver them to KARM, as well as programs that deliver meals to homeless camps and people in recovery.

“We work with Second Harvest, they’re kind of our main partner,” White said. “We have an agreement with them that everybody who we donate to is also a partner of Second Harvest, so it’s everybody helping everybody with it and we’re hoping to bring more on. Rural Appalachia is on our radar on how to get things up there. We work with Compassion Ministries, who also helps Big Orange Pantry, and they take a truck up to rural Appalachia once a month to hand out proteins and things like that.”

“Kids are on my vision of what I want to do and helping after school programs, things like that where there’s kids that don’t know where their next meal is going to come and they can’t control it. If we can help there, that’s where I’d like to see it go as being more how we can help those backpack programs,” White said.

Along with their outreach, White would like to expand the operations of food4VOLS, including getting more volunteers on board as well as getting a larger space to prepare meals.

“The hope is that we get more student involvement in food4VOLS,” White said. “Right now, it’s a couple chefs and a couple students. I’m hoping to see as the program grows and funding increases that we can bring on some student workers, we can increase volunteers. The way we are right now, we have to operate lean and mean to get where we’re going.”

“We’re limited right now to one kitchen. My hope is that we could have another kitchen that we can go to, maybe there’s an extra one on campus that we can move into, maybe there’s room in our facility to be able to renovate and create a food4VOLS kitchen that is its own standalone location. If we had something like that, we’d be limitless in what we do,” White said.

As they prepare these meals, they hope that students will take food when they need it. They want to cross the hurdle and stigma of taking food that is prepared and offered for anyone. They want students, faculty and staff who are hesitant to know that the food is for them and to not be afraid of taking a meal.

“There is a stigma of using just the resources in general that are on this campus,” Bethel said. “There are so many resources on campus for students who may find themselves unsure of when their next paycheck is going to be, because so many students are living paycheck to paycheck while also being full-time students.”

“These resources are here, and there’s so many people who want to help and provide these resources to students. So, to not be ashamed or afraid to take part in these resources,” Bethel said.

food4VOLS hopes to continue to grow and serve the campus community. Their free meals can be accessed at the Big Orange Pantry in Greve Hall for anyone on campus to enjoy. Through their operations, they’ve become the central program for food recovery on campus.

“Campus itself is excited about it,” White said. “Administration seems excited where they’ll call us and say, ‘Hey we just had an event, can you guys come recover this?’”

“We want to be seen as the hub for food donation and collection on campus. Whether it’s Sustainability sending us stuff, whether it’s us collecting it personally, if the food comes here first, we can make sure it’s going to get to the individuals who need it,” White said.

If you are looking to donate or to learn more about food4VOLS, you can do so here.