The Good 5 Cent Cigar

Issue date: 11/15/07 Section: News

Media Credit: Sarah FitzGerald Trays of leftover food travel to the back room of Hope Dining Hall. The food will be ground up and disposed.

11/15/07 - Have you ever cooked a large dinner and not known what to do with the leftovers? University of Rhode Island Dining Services has the same problem every day, but it cooks dinner for thousands of people, and has found several ways to use or dispose of its leftovers.

"Leftovers are a huge deal for us," Michael McCullough, Dining Services' assistant administrator of food services said. "To be successful you really can't have too many."

McCullough said the best way to cut down on leftovers is to only cook as much food as students will want on a given day.

To accomplish this, the manager of each dining hall engages in a type of "forecasting," predicting how much of each type of food will be eaten on a given day. They use factors such as the known popularity of items, if a school break or long weekend is approaching or underway, and even that day's weather.

McCullough said that on days when the weather is inclement, especially when classes are cancelled, the dining halls see a very large number of students looking for a big meal. "We gear up on those days," he said.

Conversely, the dining hall staff knows to make less food on warm spring days, when many people will go off campus or eat outside, but to have more Smoothie ingredients on hand.

"Our goal in a perfect world is never to have anything leftover," McCullough said.

However, some leftover food is unavoidable. McCullough said that Dining Services keeps leftover food refrigerated for 72 hours. Rhode Island Health Department regulations say that leftover food can be kept for a week, but McCullough said, "We choose to play it safe and go half that time."

McCullough said that dining staff tries to utilize leftovers in another meal rather than simply serving the same item again. For example, leftover taco ingredients will be used in taco pizza. He said that the wok, pasta and pizza stations are a good way to use leftover foods. They also prevent food waste because students can choose exactly what they want.

McCullough said that wasted food is a problem for Dining Services when students take more food than they can eat and throw it away. He said that this problem is more prevalent in the fall semester, when freshman students are dazzled by the selection of food in the dining halls and take everything that looks good, rather than everything they can eat in one sitting.

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