What is Europe getting right about food waste in schools?

At my youngest child’s daycare, in Munich, Germany, parents are asked to fill in a chart at least a week in advance noting any specific days the child will be absent, like for scheduled travel. This allows the caterers to reduce the amount of food they prepare and serve, so that there’s less likelihood of leftovers. My middle child’s preschool puts reusable containers out at the end of each day and parents are encouraged to take leftovers from lunchtime home with them and return the containers the following morning. And all three of my children’s educational institutions have reusable plates and cutlery for every meal provided, without any single-use utensils.

These positive food-waste practices in Germany — where I now live after having grown up in the United States — seem to support the data suggesting that the European Union is more effectively reducing its food waste than is the U.S. Indeed, even as Americans have grown increasingly aware of the problem and the government has made commitments to reduce the 40% of food that goes uneaten, recent studies show that food waste in the United States is actually increasing. In April 2023, ReFed, an organization dedicated to combating food waste, reported that the amount of uneaten food in the U.S. has grown 4.8% since 2016. By contrast, food waste has decreased in the EU during this same period.

Has the EU solved educational food waste?

Not quite. Within the European Union, the average student produces 19.3 kilograms of food waste on an annual basis, around 9% of total food waste. This number is roughly the same percentage of institutional and food service waste as the U.S., which is 8%. Going by these statistics alone, it seems like the U.S. and Europe are on equal footing with food waste issues, in schools at least. But during a thorough assessment carried out in 2018-2019, researchers found that food waste in American school cafeterias was significantly higher than in other Western countries: “Plate waste” (food taken but not eaten and then thrown away) in Sweden, for instance, was at maximum 23% of food served in schools, whereas the United States had plate waste accounting anywhere from 27 to 53% of food served. And from my own anecdotal evidence — working in preschools and schools throughout the U.S. and speaking with friends and family members back in the States — it does seem that European approaches are working better. What can Americans learn from their counterparts on the Continent?

Food waste challenges in Western schools

Schools in both the EU and the U.S. struggle with similar challenges, the most common being plate waste. To explore some of the obstacles here in Germany, I reached out to the Competence Center for Nutrition (Kompetenzzentrum für Ernährung aka KERN) in our province of Bavaria and spoke to staff member Anika Dickel. “There are many different ways that food gets wasted at [Bavarian] schools,” Dickel says. “School kitchens or caterers will cook or order too much food, out of concern that there won’t be enough for everyone. A large cause for excessive plate waste is that staff members either put too much food on the child’s plate or perhaps the wrong items and then the students don’t empty their plate.” In Germany, school lunch is typically “universal,” meaning everyone is eligible to receive it and the vast majority of students do not regularly bring lunches from home, though they might bring their own snacks. In the U.S., addressing plate waste is even more complicated since some students partake in school lunch every day while others partake only on some days (say, Pizza Fridays) and oftentimes the kitchen does not have advance warning.

Successful approaches and initiatives

In both the EU and U.S., school- or regional-level initiatives and educational interventions seem to have the most reliability and traction. These tools are implemented on what typically tends to be a small-scale, case-by-case basis.

Food share tables

StopWaste, a waste reduction public agency in Alameda County, California, has developed a number of thoughtful approaches to food waste for schools in their county. Annalisa Belliss, the program manager on the Food Waste Reduction Team, reports that the so-called share table concept has worked well for them: “A food share table is a designated space for students to place unopened, unbitten items such as whole fruit, packaged carrots, milk cartons or packaged hot lunches that they no longer wish to eat, so that another student can select from those items. We’ve found that food share tables have facilitated the sharing of over 220 entrees in a single day at a school site.”

Educational initiatives

In both Germany and the U.S., “farm to school” or “edible education” offerings in school settings have successfully encouraged students and faculty to cut down on food waste. Anika Dickel of KERN mentions some concrete examples: “For instance, at the St. Anna Gymnasium [in Munich], the students are actively engaged with the topic of ‘rescued food’ from local bakeries and butchers, so that the cafeteria uses as much ‘rescued’ food as possible.” At a school in Regensburg, students “have regular competitions where each class’s food waste is weighed weekly and the class who has the least food waste is the winner.” The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has promoted similar competitions for American students and offers resources for schools to conduct their own food waste audits.

Getting kids into the kitchen

Scratch cooking and cooking education initiatives have been proven to help cut down on food waste and improve students’ nutritional intake, both in the United States and in Germany. One compelling example of this is the Hawai’i State Department of Education’s ’Aina Pono Farm to School initiative. Through the pilot program, students at schools such as Mililani High School in Oahu were able to sample various healthy, less processed dishes and give their personal feedback on menu choices. As a result, students ate far more of the meals on offer, reducing food overproduction at the school by 20%.

In a similar vein, at my middle child’s preschool in Germany, they participated in a regional initiative called Project Table, Set Yourself (Projekt Tischlein deck dich) that provided the children with an integrative education about nutrition, agriculture and food preparation. Through the program, the children became much more conscious about food waste and by doing a lot of their own cooking and food preparation, they became excited about eating a wider variety of foods, which also led to less leftover food after meals.

Communicating clearly

One possible solution to reduce plate waste is fairly straightforward according to KERN team members. During mealtimes, they suggest “better communication between the kitchen, staff members and students” when it comes to what food — and how much of it — gets served. It’s much easier to do this in a daycare setting where teachers serve students at just a few tables, versus in a busy high school cafeteria where the lunch line may see thousands of students over the course of a day. Nevertheless, this simple yet effective strategy shouldn’t be discounted.

Moving the boardroom out of the lunchroom

For the U.S. to do better, decreasing corporate influence and eliminating mandatory foods might be a way to cut down on plate waste. Dairy and meat industries in the U.S. have lobbied to gain access to school children by making a number of foods, snacks or entire food groups mandatory or just omnipresent. For example, milk (in cartons) is required to be served as part of school lunch, but statistics show that milk consumption in the U.S. has decreased greatly in recent years, meaning a lot of the milk is taken, but thrown away — around 45 million gallons worth, according to the World Wildlife Foundation. Germany doesn’t have these specific issues, but there is a lot of conversation here about the need to reduce how much meat is served, both for health reasons and because children reportedly throw much of it away.

Improving utensil waste management

 Where Germany and many other European countries really stand out is their approach to utensils and packaging. In Germany, the vast majority of schools, daycares and universities use reusable plates, cutlery and cups, which are washed daily by teachers or kitchen staff for use the following day. Those institutions in Germany that use outside for their students catering rarely receive food wrapped in single-use packaging. Instead, caterers typically deliver insulated boxes full of stainless steel containers, which then get rinsed out and returned at the end of the day. This can be connected in part to recently passed public policy mandating that caterers and restaurants reduce throwaway containers.

Changing culture, changing systems

Broadly speaking, Germany — and the EU countries in general — simply seem better positioned for success in this area. Germany, for one, has ambitious climate change prevention goals that have been nationally greenlighted. Although the U.S. has a national food waste strategy, most existing laws regarding food waste have come from individual states, making nationwide adoption of uniform policy a challenge. Another contributing factor could be cultural differences: German customers are accustomed to using reusable mugs and cutlery everywhere from Starbucks to amusement parks and portion sizes at many restaurants and cafes are often smaller than those at American establishments. Germans are also generally sustainability minded: According to a sustainability and consumer insights expert at GfK, which conducts an annual study of German consumer habits, “In a list of 57 personal values measured annually as part of the GfK Consumer Life Study [in 2022], sustainability ranks 10^th place, ahead of values such as health and fitness.” Ultimately it seems that while small-scale and grassroots efforts on a community level are fantastic and vital — and should be promoted and encouraged — substantial, lasting improvements in food waste lie in both systemic and cultural shifts.