A Food Recovery Strategy for Catered Events on the UBC Campus
Creators: name: Or, Ka Lai
name: Septiani, Rizki
Publisher: name: The University of British Columbia
Year: 2024

description: Global food systems contribute to 21-40% of global greenhouse gas emissions, presenting significant opportunities for climate action. Food waste, in particular, has significantly contributed to climate change through methane emissions in landfills, therefore, reducing food waste is crucial to decarbonizing the food system. One strategy is to recover and redistribute surplus food to prevent it from becoming food waste. Food recovery can potentially contribute to progress towards multiple UN Sustainable Development Goals, addressing climate change and zero hunger. The UBC SEEDS Sustainability Program (SEEDS) has identified leftovers at catered events as one source of food waste on campus. This project investigates the prevalent food waste issues from catered events across the UBC campus and examines a recovery strategy to reduce food waste and enhance sustainability in food systems. Using primary and secondary data from document analysis, observations, and interviews, the project encompasses the identification of barriers and opportunities to reduce food waste from catered events on the UBC Vancouver campus through a food recovery strategy. The project finds that the debate on the magnitude of food waste from catered events on the UBC campus persists, raising concern about how food waste from catered events is seen as less of a concern by relevant stakeholders. The project also identifies policy and regulation gaps and perceived risks and costs associated with the safety aspect of the food as the key barriers to recovering food from catered events. Further, the project recognizes resistance to recovering food using free food alert initiatives, and the recoverability of leftover food depends not only on related regulations but also on the type of food and how easily it can be packaged and transported. The project, therefore, suggests the following actions. First, there is a need to foster collaboration between relevant departments on the UBC campus to develop a mechanism that can systematically collect, manage, and report food waste data from catered events to understand the scope of the issue and guide interventions. Second, fostering partnerships with established food security initiatives (e.g., AMS Food Bank, Agora Cafe, UBC Sprout) is also essential to streamline the recovery and redistribution of surplus food. Third, regarding policy and regulation barriers, engaging food safety experts to address regulatory concerns and establish clear guidelines for food recovery from catered events is inevitably crucial. This project has a limited number of participants, suggesting the need for further research with broader participants to understand better the perceived risks and costs associated with food safety in food recovery efforts. Disclaimer: “UBC SEEDS provides students with the opportunity to share the findings of their studies, as well as their opinions, conclusions and recommendations with the UBC community. The reader should bear in mind that this is a student project/report and is not an official document of UBC. Furthermore readers should bear in mind that these reports may not reflect the current status of activities at UBC. We urge you to contact the research persons mentioned in a report or the SEEDS Coordinator about the current status of the subject matter of a project/report.”