By Erin Shea

Mom may have had a point when she said to finish the food on your plate because ‘there are starving kids in the world.’

The UK Student Dietetic Association measured that a little more than 500 people threw away about 106 pounds of food during a three-hour period at Blazer Café on north campus.

This means that if Blazer had about the same amount of diners picking up the same amount of food for their plate throughout its nine and a half hours of operation, customers threw away about 335 pounds of food in total.

“We want to figure out how much waste we have here on campus in the cafeterias … and get people to recognize how much they waste,” Laura Barry, hunger co-chair of the UKSDA, said.

The UKSDA answered that question by weighing the amount of food that students threw away on Friday from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.

No one in the organization had expected the total amount of wasted food to be more than 45 pounds, and within an hour they had already measured almost 35 pounds, Monica Fowler, hunger co-chair of UKSDA, said.

“This is a big issue everywhere, it is incredible how much food is thrown away,” Fowler said.”People overestimate how much they want to eat.”

One of the organization’s goals is to get students to realize that while they may take food for granted, there are many people around the world who are starving.

A big issue with wasting food is that people do not realize how much they pick up and do not eat, Barry said.

While measuring a group of students’ plates, Barry overheard them saying they did not know they were wasting so much, and felt guilty after they realized the waste was being weighed.

Pre-nursing freshman Anna Coleman, a regular at campus dining halls, said on average she thinks students throw away about 1/4 of what they put on their plates. The dining halls give out too much food and items should be closer to appropriate serving sizes, she said.

“If they (students) are taking too much food, they are also probably taking in too much food and promoting the obesity issue, and Kentucky is one of the top ten fattest states,” Fowler said.

In 2008, Kentucky was the seventh fattest state, according to a report on CalorieLab.com.

David Parsley, an employee for UK’s Center for Manufacturing, said he throws away food about 1/3 of the time that he eats at campus dining halls, and he thinks all-you-can-eat buffet styles promote wasting food more than dining areas like the Student Center.

Fowler and Barry said the amount of food that was wasted Friday will be the goal for the amount of canned food that the UKSDA wants to donate to God’s Pantry, a Lexington-based food bank that distributes collected food products across the state.

The UKSDA will be partnering with Students Taking Action Globally to promote “Hunger in the Halls,” where they will collect can goods in the dorms, Student Center, White Hall Classroom Building, and select locations off campus in support of Hunger Awareness Week, which starts on October 12.  The collecting of can goods on campus will be from October 6 thru the 17, and all canned goods collected will go to God’s Pantry.