Community: Many Hands, Light Work

Including myself, there are four members in Team Food Waste.  A little bit to my surprise, we all have pretty different approaches and experiences to reducing our food waste.  As seen through my previous posts, I have tried to eat at least 75% of the food on my plate (if not all of it) and have made my challenge known to my teammates, who eat dinner, my most problematic meal, with me.  It seems like Elizabeth has the most similar experience to me.  She deals with her eyes being bigger than her stomach after a sports practice and so has utilized her teammates to help her return a clean plate to the garbage disposal window.  I never thought of this, but I really like Brianna’s one plate idea.  Though I haven’t used this tactic I can definitely see the effectiveness of it.  I know an issue I’ve had is filling my plate up with food, going back to my table, then realizing there’s something else so getting that as well.  The one plate rule makes one look at all options with extra care and limiting how much one takes, therefore wasting less.  I think my experience differs the most from Jon’s.  Whereas I use my friends to help me, he saw that as a barrier so he made the change to eat more meals alone.

Creating this community made me realize that I wasn’t alone in my efforts for a more sustainable behavior.  Especially if you have a behavior that you aren’t the most proud of, you can sometimes feel like you’re the only one who participates in said habit.  Creating a community created a support system where the members can bounce ideas, encourage, or commiserate with each other.  Furthermore, putting many minds together means hearing about better ways to achieve the goal of decreasing food waste.

Overall, creating the community presented some great ideas and different experiences in decreasing food waste, but I think I’ve done a pretty good job with my efforts.  I think Brianna’s one plate rule is a great way to keep my focus and prevent myself from taking food.  For the homestretch, I am going to try to use that rule whenever I go to the dining hall.  I’ve found that as long as I remember the SBC though (which has been almost always), I can easily stick to my goals especially with my teammates keeping an eye on me.