A public awareness campaign by the Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio is encouraging people to reduce their food waste through social media posts, newsletters, an emphasis on saving money, and partnerships with elementary schools to teach children about the impact of food waste.

Students at Temple University are using their unused meal "swipes"--or prepaid dining hall entries--to help buy food for those in need in Philadelphia. The organization Swipes for Philadelphia now has expanded their initial idea to host general meetings on topics like food insecurity, homelessness, and overall struggles of low-wage workers. The organization also tackles related issues like food waste.

University of Wisconsin students and faculty are attempting to change the way food is treated on campus to minimize waste. The dining halls compost leftovers, and food is also donated to Campus Kitchens, which serves food-insecure students. Food Shed is a new initiative to share food grown for research in refrigerators around campus, open to all. Leaders hope these initiatives reduce food insecurity and waste simultaneously.

Since 1999, the FoodCam has helped to nearly eliminate food waste at one MIT lab. Any time someone has leftover food at the lab, they can place it under a camera and hit a button, which then triggers the FoodCam to take a photo of the food and post it to slack, Twitter, and an email list. The simple invention has significantly reduced food waste, representing a small positive change to a serious global challenge.

The University of Notre Dame installed three Grind2Energy systems, which aims to reduce the amount of food waste from the campus’ dining halls. The systems process the waste and send it to a local dairy farm where they break down the material to produce biogas that is used to generate electrical power for 1,000 homes each day in Plymouth, Indiana. While not everyone at the university has committed to the sustainability efforts, these systems can be scaled to be used on other college campuses.

Leftover food from publicly-funded school meals is not simply an issue of wasted tax dollars and environmental concern, it is a detrimental misallocation of much needed food for many students who still go hungry in schools across the country each day. The Share Tables program is helping to more equitably distribute food by providing a space where unopened items from one student's lunch may be deposited on a designated table (or tub, or shelf) for hungry peers to take - not only reducing food waste and child hunger, but helping students develop empathy and healthier eating habits.

Across the United States, schools, government agencies, and individuals are taking steps to reduce food waste in our schools’ cafeterias. There are collaborations that are trying to change the systemic processes by creating guides on how to conduct food waste audits, providing research frameworks for innovative change, and providing policy guidance. A large effort is underway to change how children think about food, which means bringing them to farms and into kitchens to bring them closer to the process.