American students in all grades waste on average 20-50% of the food they are given at lunch time. Unfortunately, it isn’t any different here at Granite Bay High School.

Currently, there isn’t any place for students to put unwanted food besides the trash, and while the Cafeteria workers here are doing what they can to reduce waste, anything outside of the lunch lines is out of their control. 

“We have to give them all the food groups. We can’t just give them chips. They have to get something else,” Rachel, who works in GBHS’s cafeteria, said. “Once [the food] leaves the cafeteria there’s nothing we can do about it so it has to be the administration that puts something out there.”

 Across campus, there are people who care and don’t want to see perfectly good food be thrown away.

“I think it’s a good idea.” Pierce Fondren said, who is a sophomore at Granite Bay. “I would use it but It should be put in convenient spaces, like right we’re people sit.”

During lunch time last year, bins were placed around the lunch lines. This gave students another place to put food beside the trash and it was going to food shelters, at first. But, problems began to arise and the bins went away. 

“We were only allowed to save food that didn’t have to be refrigerated,” John Pichon said, who is an assistant principal at Granite Bay High School. “That food would need to be taken away [to food shelters] on a daily basis and that was not happening last year which was one of the reasons we had to stop.”

The bins were successful in collecting the food, but when it was sitting at school overnight it was attracting rodents and wasn’t getting to food shelters in time.

“It is a goal to avoid food waste and that is something that we will revisit as a site,” Pichon said. The Granite Bay community will soon be needed to help promptly distribute food before it goes bad. 

Reach out to John Pichon if you want to know what you can do to help at [email protected]