Engineers Without Borders promotes food waste awareness

By Arby Seño, April 4 2017 —

Do you think you could tell the difference between a plate full of food and a plate full of garbage? It might be harder than you think.

To help raise food waste awareness, the University of Calgary chapter of Engineers Without Borders held an event at the U of C on March 30. Club members took discarded food from a dumpster, placed it on a plate and set it up to look like an authentic meal. The club placed a sign by the display indicating that it was, in fact, garbage.

Second-year mechanical engineering student Darpan Singh Grewal — who is the venture leader of Poverty in Canada, a subsection of Engineers Without Borders — said the club used the shock campaign to point out how often perfectly good food goes to waste.

“It definitely could have been eaten,” Grewal said of the wasted food. “They took too much or [said] ‘I’m too full.’ There is no concept of ‘saving it for later’ or ‘I’m freezing the food’.”

The event took place in ICT // Courtesy Engineers Without Borders U of c

Grewal said the club has also
increased its advocacy to include elementary school students to help raise food waste awareness. 

“We created a presentation workshop for schools and we partnered with schools to show kids how we waste food by educating them,” he said.

The workshops include having students buy enough food for a week, make a meal plan and then use as much of the food as possible. Students were then asked about the amount of food they actually used.

By raising awareness about food waste at the U of C, Grewal hopes students will recognize the chain of resources, farming, packaging and delivering that is disregarded when food is wasted.

“It’s been shipped, grown and brought to here, packaged.” Grewal said.

Engineers Without Borders is an international non-governmental organization that promotes in development projects and initiatives. The U of C chapter is one of 34 professional and student chapters in Canada.