How do you avoid throwing away large quantities of excess food that nobody wants to eat?
About six years ago, the Memphis Food Bank faced this same problem until dietetic students from The University of Memphis started developing recipes for under-utilized foods.
“We’re looking at a departmental-wide opportunity for service learning,” said Terra Smith, associate professor of consumer science and education and developer of Undergraduate Scholarship Service.
Smith uses her experimental foods course and advanced foods system course to develop new products with under-utilized foods, and create and analyze menus for the food bank and its other service organizations in the community.
Dietetics is the study of the kinds and quantities of food needed for health. It is a concentration in the consumer science and education department.
“Agencies have been better able to create and utilize ideas for the food personnel to work with (because of the students help),” said Herbert Ann Krisle, associate director of the Food Bank.
USS is a partnership between the department of consumer science and education at The University, Smith and the Food Bank, and through it, students in Smith’s experimental foods course have developed recipes for excess foods like bagels and infant formula.
“We normally do food product development, but the products we use are foods that need to be investigated by the Food Bank,” Smith said.
Students incorporated bagels into dishes like meatloaf, spinach casserole and meatballs and substituted infant formula for milk to create recipes.
Although Krisle could not give a concrete number for the amount of food that has been saved, she did say the recipes have helped decrease the amount of excess food.
In a service-learning project, students in Smith’s advanced foods systems course cook and serve meals and develop and evaluate menus for different organizations serviced by the Food Bank.
“We would go to the Salvation Army and evaluate their menus to make sure it was nutritionally sound,” said Alexa George, a junior consumer science and education major with a concentration in dietetics.
“They have to learn how to plan and evaluate menus,” Smith said. “If we’re going to do that, why not do it for an organization that can’t afford to have that done.”
In addition to interacting with the community, students also participate in a focus group in which they discuss their experiences at different organizations.
George said participating in both projects allowed her to apply textbook material to real-life situations.
“You got a sense that you were doing something worthwhile,” George said.
