“Dining Services, Student Gardens, and Sustainability Advocates Are Rethinking Food Waste”
By Ferris Strachan and Dr. Greg Gondwe
SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. – California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB) publicly champions sustainability, but an investigation by The Coyote Chronicle reveals a disconnect between its stated environmental goals and the realities of campus operations. Each day, Coyote Commons prepares hundreds of meals, yet significant portions are routinely discarded—uneaten, unused, and unrecovered. Meanwhile, the ASI Coyote Garden, located mere steps from the dining hall, struggles with depleted soil and lacks access to the very compostable material being thrown away.
“We see it every day,” said a longtime faculty member, who requested anonymity. “Students take full trays, eat half, and the rest gets dumped. And that’s just what we see. What doesn’t make it to the line at all? That’s another story.”
This cycle of abundance and waste begins early each morning. At 7 a.m., while most of the campus remains quiet, General Manager Tyson Torres arrives at The Coyote Commons and performs a daily ritual of tasting the food. Before a single dish reaches the student dining line, Torres ensures that flavor, temperature, and texture meet the university’s quality expectations. It’s a small yet critical step that shapes the day’s service. By 9 a.m., the kitchen is alive with motion. Executive Chef Monica Castaneda-Black leads a team of cooks through the final stages of breakfast and lunch preparation. Trays of roasted vegetables, pasta, and seasoned proteins are carefully arranged for the buffet-style service that follows. “Timing is everything”, said Chef Monica, “meals must be made well in advance yet stay fresh through peak hours”. Overseeing the broader logistics is Director of Dining Services Markeisha Barbee, who monitors expected foot traffic and meal requirements. On a typical academic day, Coyote Commons serves about 900 students – a number that drops to roughly 300 in the summer, shifting both the volume of food prepared and the staffing needs. Yet regardless of the season, food waste remains a daily occurrence.
Dining Services estimates they discard about 75 pounds of uneaten or unused food each week, down from 100 pounds last year, a modest improvement attributed to the committed staff members, inventory software upgrades and expanded donation efforts. Yet even with improved controls, food waste remains deeply embedded in daily operations. “Some days, it’s perfectly good pasta or vegetables,” said Castaneda-Black. “We just can’t reuse it once it’s been prepped and not served.” Even if just 10% of prepared meals are wasted, that equates to over 90 full servings per day during the academic year, and nearly 34,000 meals annually.
But the environmental impact far outweighs the numbers on a ledger. Once discarded, leftover meals don’t simply disappear. Instead, they begin a second, far more harmful life in landfills. There, decomposing organic matter releases methane, a greenhouse gas that is over 80 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In fact, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) identifies food waste as the single largest category of material sent to landfills, where it accounts for nearly 24% of total landfill content. Every wasted meal also represents a chain of squandered resources, like the hundreds of gallons of water used to grow crops, the electricity needed to power kitchens, the fuel burned during food transportation, and the labor of farmers, cooks, and cleaning staff, all lost with every tray that ends up in the trash. Globally, producing food that is ultimately wasted consumes the equivalent of 3.6 billion acres of agricultural land, nearly 30% of the world’s farmland.In the U.S. alone, food waste is estimated to cost over $408 billion annually, according to ReFED, a nonprofit focused on food system solutions. Even if just 10% of prepared meals are wasted, that equates to over 90 full servings per day during the academic year, and nearly 34,000 meals annually.
Despite these challenges, CSUSB has found creative ways to make some use of its surplus. The Obershaw DEN, the university’s on-campus food pantry, accepts leftover packaged meals and sealed snacks. It serves as a lifeline for students who don’t always have access to regular meals.
“We recently donated leftover snacks and breakfast items from the fall,” said Barbee. “Students can shop the pantry weekly or pick up snacks several times a week.”
Additionally, the Vista Program repackages untouched meals and distributes them to community members outside campus. These partnerships are vital, but not without complications. Health codes, timing, and storage limitations mean that not all excess food can be rescued in time.
“We sometimes overproduce to avoid underfeeding,” Tyson said. “It’s a difficult balance between caution and conservation.”
Despite the persistent challenge of food waste, the Staff at the Dining services have found innovative ways to ensure that some of its surplus food serves a greater purpose. One of the key players in this effort is The Obershaw DEN, the university’s on-campus food pantry. Located inside the Santos Manuel Student Union. The pantry provides access to free food, hygiene products, and basic necessities for students who may be facing financial hardship or food insecurity.
Each week, Dining Services donates leftover packaged meals and sealed snacks that are safe and suitable for redistribution. This practice not only diverts food from ending up in the landfill but also supports the growing number of students who rely on the pantry for supplemental nutrition. From breakfast bars and cereal packs to individually wrapped sandwiches, these donations help ease the burden for those who might otherwise skip meals.
“We recently donated leftover snacks and breakfast items from the fall,” said Markeisha Barbee, Director of Dining Services. “It may not seem like much, but for students juggling classes, jobs, and rent, those small items make a big difference. Some students shop the pantry once a week, while others stop by multiple times just to grab a snack between classes.”
In addition to supporting students, the Dining Service department extends its food recovery efforts beyond campus through the Vista Program. Run in collaboration with community organizations, the program collects untouched, properly stored meals and repackages them for distribution to local residents in need. Meals that are never served (often due to overproduction or event cancellations) are quickly cooled, repacked, and delivered to partnering shelters and food banks.
However, these partnerships, though critical, come with logistical and regulatory hurdles. Health and safety standards restrict what kinds of food can be donated and how long they can be stored. Some surplus must be discarded simply because it exceeds holding times or lacks proper labeling. Storage space is limited, and without additional refrigeration units or trained personnel to oversee the process, not all usable food is saved.
“We sometimes overprepare to make sure we never run out,” said Tyson, general manager of Coyote Commons. “But that also means we’re taking a gamble. It’s a difficult balance between being cautious (ensuring every student who walks in has a meal) and being conservative to avoid waste.”
As a result, a significant amount of food still ends up in trash bins. This includes not only partially eaten meals but also the inedible byproducts of daily food preparation like fruit peels, vegetable trimmings, eggshells, and coffee grounds. These scraps, though unsuitable for donation, could hold considerable value as compost for the CSUSB student garden and other gardens in the surrounding communities of San Bernardino. Yet at CSUSB, their potential remains largely unrealized. Despite efforts by Dining Services staff to separate organic waste from other garbage, there is no clear system in place to handle it once it leaves the kitchen. Without a composting program to collect, process and repurpose it, the waste is ultimately discarded, its nutritional value lost to the landfill.
“We save the scraps,” said Executive Chef Monica. “Fruit peels, vegetable trimmings, e.t.c., they’re separated and set aside. But we don’t have a formal way to get them to the garden or anywhere else they could be used. They usually end up in the trash by the end of the day.”
This breakdown in the system is all the more frustrating given the physical proximity of the ASI Coyote Garden, a small, student-run green space nestled just a few hundred feet from the Coyote Commons dining hall. The garden, which uses organic methods and grows food for the campus food pantry, would be a natural destination for composted materials. But despite the short distance, no connection currently exists between the kitchen and the soil.
What could be a closed-loop system (where food waste from the dining hall nourishes the very soil that produces fresh vegetables for student consumption) remains stalled by logistical gaps. The lack of compost bins, collection protocols, and processing stations on campus means that valuable organic matter is discarded daily, even as garden volunteers struggle with depleted soil and the high cost of fertilizer. The gap is not in ideas, but in leadership and logistics.
“We have the ingredients for a zero-waste system,” said a concerned student who asked to remain anonymous. “But no recipe. No funding. No plan.”
The result is a university with abundant food, committed staff, and passionate students—but a garden that still pulls weeds by hand while rich organic matter is sent to landfills.
But is change possible? The Coyote Commons dinning services department staff envision a different future. They see students growing vegetables in the garden, Dining Services turning them into meals, and food scraps returning to the soil as compost. A circular food system, all within CSUSB’s campus.
“This isn’t just about reducing waste,” Barbee said. “It’s about education, health, and equity. It’s about showing students what sustainability really looks like, not just as a word, but as a system.”
The challenge, she said, is turning that vision into a campus priority.
“But we can’t do it alone,” said Chef Monica. “We need students to get involved. Every plate, every peel, every effort makes a difference.”
California State University, San Bernardino has the food, the labor, and the land. It has a dining hall producing waste, a pantry feeding hungry students, and a garden trying to grow without the compost it desperately needs. What it lacks is coordination; a plan to connect what is being wasted to what is being grown. Until that happens, CSUSB will remain a campus of plenty with a garden in need.
Have a tip or want to contribute to our sustainability coverage? Email Dr. Gondwe [gregory.gondwe@csusb.edu] at the Coyote Chronicle.
Acknowledgment:
This reporting was supported by the Sustainable Food Systems (SFS) at CSUSB, funded through the USDA NIFA Mini-Grant Award, administered by the Department of Health Science & Human Ecology under the Sustainable Food Systems initiative.