These past couple of months have really opened my eyes to multidisciplinary and/ interdisciplinary studies and how they’ve both played a role in my life before I even knew about them. The case study on food really hit home for me since it was a topic of interest in the Social Justice class in my graduating year of high school. We gathered all the garbage around the whole school and conducted a “garbage audit” and found the percentages of food waste, recyclables in the garbage, and other things that just did not belong in the waste basket. Ever since that class, and the garbage audit in particular, I have tried my best to be more conscious of my food waste and recycling in general. I believe in order for there to be true change in the way to handle food waste worldwide, we have to take the issue to politicians and make policies in order to regulate and make it a habit for people to think about how they get rid of their food waste.
Below I have attached a few personal photos from the garbage audit my class held. In them you may notice how many bags we were able to acquire and dug through in order to inspect. Through this process, we would open one bag at a time and carefully pick through each item and put it in its corresponding box. Each box was labeled with a specific title. We had boxes ranging from “Beverage Containers” to “Compostable Papers”. This really helped us, not only as a class but as a school as a whole to see what people were throwing in the landfill on a very small scale. From our findings we noticed a need for food recycling containers, more paper recycling around school grounds, not just in classrooms and last but not least, an educational piece on the importance of recycling and disposing of food waste properly and efficiently.
I believe this was a great way to open my mind up to what was going on, not only in my high school but also all around the world. I hope that as a conversation is being held on food waste and its importance, a change can be made on a larger, international scale.
