UH Dining Services used the week of Earth Day to host its Go Green! event at Cougar Woods Dining Commons to show how students, faculty, and staff can make a difference by keeping our world clean and taking steps to implement sustainability.
The department is committed to providing healthy and nutritious food from sustainable sources. The dining hall received this year’s Waste Reduction Award and the Sustainable Seafood Award from the Green Restaurant Association.
Go Green! wanted to highlight that everyone’s actions have an effect on the planet. A comment poster greeted diners to post the small steps they take in helping the environment. The event focused on how adding more green vegetables to one’s diet and not wasting food could contribute to a healthier diet and a healthier Earth.
“I feel like it better educated us about what happens with our world, especially our trash — an everyday thing — and how we can learn about it,” said Anish Babu, a biology freshman.
Fun facts were posted on the flat screens at the food stations to promote the celebration’s
theme.
“It taught me that there's a more sustainable way to throw away food. It doesn’t have
to be just on the conveyor belt because we have composting here,” said Andrew Economon,
an economics junior. “I learned that there are a lot of ways to make new food creations
with plants.”
Add Green to Your Plate
Following last year’s menu trend, items included green variations to well-known dishes
with or without green sides that also added to their flavoring.
Diners could choose to select or mix and match:
- Green coconut shrimp curry with basmati rice with peas and roasted broccoli.
- Grilled beef meatballs chimichurri with garlic herb olive oil mashed potatoes, spicy collard greens, and grilled Brussels sprouts with lemon.
- Spinach cheese quesadilla with cilantro lime slaw and guacamole.
- Green herb marinated chicken with cilantro lime quinoa and sautéed squash and zucchini.
Other green items included pesto pizza with arugula; herb oil pasta with creamy pesto alfredo sauce; avocado ranch dressing; and seed energy bites, white chocolate shortbread, and chocolate cupcakes that all included matcha.
“I’m a vegetarian. I was like, whoa, this is actually nice,” said Babu. “Arugula pizza, that was my favorite. I also liked the Brussels sprouts and how they did it.”
Food Does Not Have to End Up as Trash
Curbing the amount of food that is thrown away is another big issue. Since 2021, Cougar Woods has diverted more than one million pounds of food waste from ending up in landfills. The department has also donated more than 40,000 pounds of surplus food to services for students and to centers and shelters in the community.
“Food waste is a big problem in America,” said Susan Griffin, MS, RD, director of Wellness & Sustainability. “If food was a country, it’d be third in line as the biggest after the United States and China.”
Interactive activities were set up at the Go Green! event to bring awareness of the problem and to offer diners solutions that can be used to reduce food waste.
- Polar vs. Pantry — guests were quizzed on how to properly store common food items, such as potatoes, bananas, lettuces and greens, and garlic, to extend their shelf life.
- Plate Waste Interview — students were given a visualization of how much food they throw away and could guess how much food the commons collect over a week and how long it takes to decompose.
- Compost Trail Mix — visitors combined their own DIY edible composting trail mix to understand what goes into the composition of compost. Pretzels represented sticks; corn flakes, dry leaves; cranberries, food scraps; and gummy worms as the creepy crawlies that aid the decomposition process.
- Compost Education — representatives from Zero Waste Houston, the organization that collects the dining hall’s food waste and uses it to make compost, provided more details on what goes into compost and its benefits; offered native plants; took diners’ garbage, sorting out the food waste; and gave information on its upcoming free two-part certification course on hot composting on May 9 and 16.
“The number one cause of food waste is plate waste from campus users. It's not what we do in the kitchen, but it is what we do there,” said Beatrix Madersbacher Eide, sustainability coordinator for the Office of Sustainability, which partnered with UH Dining Service on Go Green! “And it’s important to raise awareness, one to combat food waste, but also to celebrate the composting work that Cougar Woods does here.”
A bingo card with the booths, which included a free popsicle from local paleta vendor Popsibilities, gave attendees a fun path to follow and an opportunity for a gift once they received a stamp from all the locations.
“I would say it honestly gives me hope for the future of sustainability at UH, I think it’s very cool that they did this,” said Economon. “I’m interested to see what else they can do for the sustainability efforts. If we keep doing it, I think we can have a better Earth.”
