Carolina Dining Services serves thousands of meals each day — but on Tuesday they decided to put a new spin on the food it served.
Tuesday afternoon at UNC’s second annual Feeding the 5,000, hosted by Carolina Auxiliary Services, CDS workers provided a free meal to the public, using only ingredients that had been salvaged from places where they would have otherwise been wasted.
“I think it’s a good opportunity to educate and kind of promote food waste, or the reduction of food waste, in a way that catches people’s attention. Everyone likes free food, right?” said Ryan Moore, food service director for CDS.
According to their website, CDS members prepared for the event by traveling to farms around the state and collecting overproduced food products or produce that had been left on the fields due to strict cosmetic standards for production.
On Oct. 2, 2014, UNC hosted one of the first university-sponsored Feed the 5,000 events in partnership with Feedback Global, an environmental organization founded in London that started the Feeding the 5,000 program.
Moore said this year Carolina Auxiliary Services also partnered with various food vendors such as FreshPoint, an international produce vendor who donated surplus produce to be used in the event. Event workers also sourced bycatch, fish that are caught by accident while hunting for other species, from local fisheries.
Michael Gueiss, executive chef for CDS, said he kept the food simple in order to keep it appetizing.
“Basically, we’re just taking very simple food, cooking it properly and just trying to season it to where it just tastes really good,” he said.
Gueiss said CDS serves about 4.5 million meals per year in the dining halls annually, and that from those meals, nearly 560,000 pounds of food is sent back to the dish room.
