Loyola students fight food waste, expand access to sustainably grown food

It was Saturday morning, and Loyola senior Mereya Riopedre and a team of student volunteers arrived at the dining hall in the Damen Student Center and traveled downstairs to the facility’s underground kitchen. They collected trays of unused, but perfectly good food, loaded it into a van, and traveled a mile down the road to a neighborhood food pantry. There, the busy pantry staff and volunteers feed
hundreds of community members using rescued food that otherwise might have gone to waste.

The students are part of a new initiative from the School of Environmental Sustainability (SES) that aims to fight hunger and reduce waste, contributing to a more equitable and sustainable food system.

Globally, modern food systems have a massive impact on human health and the natural environment. Food production and distribution account for roughly a third of greenhouse gas emissions.

Meanwhile, worldwide, one-third of food produced goes to waste, while nearly 800 million people go hungry, and climate change threatens to exacerbate global food insecurity.

Students in SES are taking on these complex and interconnected challenges. They are training to build the environmentally sustainable and socially just food systems of the future and taking action to make a difference in the community today.

To increase Loyola’s impact, well-established sustainable food programs in SES are expanding partnerships with groups fighting food waste and hunger in Chicago. The growing collaborations reflect SES’s holistic approach to ecological issues—an approach that recognizes the multifaceted nature of these issues and highlights the need for socially just solutions to environmental problems.

Faculty, staff, students, and community organizations are working together on many fronts to advance food security and sustainability. On the academic side, SES offers a bachelor’s degree in environmental science with a concentration in food systems and sustainable agriculture. Students can also get hands-on experience with local, sustainable food production through the school’s Urban Agriculture Program.

Kevin Erickson, the SES senior sustainable agriculture manager, oversees the Urban Agriculture Program. He is leading the drive to expand initiatives that go beyond food production to address waste and equity.

“As advocates of sustainable and local food systems, we realized that a more holistic approach should include food access, recovery, and food waste,” says Erickson. “And because of our location in Chicago, we wanted to address unique challenges and opportunities in the urban environment.”

In 2023, Erickson established a partnership with Saint Thomas of Canterbury, an Edgewater Catholic church that is part of the Mary Mother of God Parish, which also includes two other churches in the neighborhood. The parish manages a food pantry and soup kitchen, and parishioners at St. Thomas of Canterbury were interested in establishing vegetable gardens on Parish properties.

Erickson provided expert guidance on urban gardening methods and arranged for two student interns in the Urban Agriculture Program to help support the initiative over the summer. The students worked one full day per week. In the mornings, their first job was to bring freshly harvested lettuce, mushrooms, carrots and other produce from Loyola’s greenhouse and garden and prepare it for distribution in the food pantry and soup kitchen. They spent the rest of the day assisting in the food pantry and working on the newly established garden beds.

Canterbury House director James Murphey says that the collaboration made it possible to offer more fresh produce in the food pantry and soup kitchen.

“I don’t think there’s a lot of healthy food in food pantries. They’re always struggling to get produce, so this is one way we can help fill that gap. The food that came from Loyola and the food that we grew here were healthy selections,” he says.

Later in 2023, a gift from philanthropist and environmental activist Julie Moller allowed Erickson and his collaborators to officially establish the Loyola Food Security and Food Distribution Program and to create two paid student internships to support the initiative.

SES seniors Mereya Riopedre and Ellie DeMilt started as Loyola’s first food equity coordinators in November 2023. They came to the roles with leadership skills and experience gained through their work with Loyola’s chapter of the Food Recovery Network (FRN).

FRN is a national, volunteer-based student movement dedicated to fighting food waste and feeding those in need. Riopedre joined the group as a first-year student, and DeMilt got involved as a sophomore. Both students took on increasing leadership responsibilities as they gained experience, eventually becoming the club’s co-presidents.

“I joined as a volunteer, and I really fell in love with the club,” says Riopedre. “Not just its environmental mission but also its push to increase food equity, especially in the Rogers Park community and the community around Loyola.”

Since the club started in 2016, FRN members have collaborated with Aramark, Loyola’s food service vendor, to recover extra food from campus dining halls. Following strict food safety guidelines, student volunteers pick up trays of food and deliver them to A Just Harvest, a Rogers Park community organization and food pantry with a longstanding partnership with Loyola.

“We never know exactly what type of food we might recover,” says Riopedre. “Food pick-ups range from 100 to 300 pounds per week and can be fresh or frozen. Food is sometimes prepackaged in transportable containers, but some weekends, volunteers get to repackage food themselves, complete with gloves and hair nets.”

Reuben Melero, the head cook in A Just Harvest’s community kitchen, says the deliveries from FRN make a big difference for the organization, which runs entirely on donations and grants. He says that a single delivery at the end of January allowed the group to provide nearly 400 nourishing meals to hungry people in Rogers Park.

DeMilt notes that it is satisfying to see the impact of this work. “Every time volunteers recover food, we take that food to A Just Harvest, and volunteers can see the kitchen where food is prepared and the dining hall where food is served and eaten. By working with this local partner, we have been able to feel the gratitude from the community,” she says.

Both Riopedre and DeMilt say that the new paid coordinator positions allow them to accomplish far more than they could as FRN volunteers.

“Stepping into this role of food equity coordinator means that we have set aside time for this work and deeper connections to Loyola administrators so we can make more significant change,” says Riopedre.

The food equity coordinators’ responsibilities include organizing more than 100 student volunteers, coordinating food recovery runs, organizing campus food drives, and building partnerships with community organizations and businesses. The work is already producing results.

During the fall 2023 semester, the coordinators and FRN members collaborated with Aramark to expand food recovery from one dining hall to three. At the end of the semester, they facilitated a campus food drive that collected 475 pounds of food for donation—more than double the quantity collected in the previous semester. Riopedre and DeMilt also trained new student volunteers and led a food recovery training session for over 100 Aramark employees.

This fall, with pandemic restrictions over, rather than just dropping off donations, FRN members also had the opportunity to serve food in the dining hall at A Just Harvest.

“We’ve had this relationship with them for so long, but we’ve been missing this aspect of understanding the organization’s inner workings,” says Riopedre. “Volunteering gave us a lot more insight.”

In 2024, the Food Security and Food Distribution Program team aims to increase total campus food recovery to 5,800 pounds, a 20 percent increase from the previous year. The group is on track to achieve this goal. They are adding more food recovery days and pickup locations on campus, and the student coordinators are developing partnerships with local grocery stores and restaurants to ensure a steady stream of donations throughout the year.

Before they graduate in May, Riopedre and DeMilt will work with Erickson to recruit and train two new food equity coordinators. The new coordinators will work throughout the summer months, helping to increase produce donations from the SES Urban Agriculture Program and neighborhood farmers’ markets.

Erickson emphasizes Loyola’s role as a collaborator that supports community groups working for food equity in Chicago.

“We’re a piece of the puzzle, and most of the solutions we’re coming up with are partnership-based,” he says.

Members of the Loyola community aim to expand on partnerships through collaborative educational programs, research, and direct action. Last year, a team of SES faculty and staff working on sustainable food systems received a Schreiber Venture Fund Innovation Grant to advance their efforts.

“The overarching goal of the project is to understand how Loyola, and more specifically our sustainable food systems group, can best support organizations in the Chicago region that are working to reduce hunger, create economic opportunity, and promote social and ecological wellbeing,” says Tania Schusler, assistant professor in SES.

With the grant, the project team created 10 new internships that place students with community organizations. The internships are designed to contribute to the organizations’ work while providing a valuable learning experience for the students.

Interns will provide skilled labor, bringing knowledge gained in the classroom and through experience in the Urban Agriculture Program and other campus sustainability initiatives. Interns will participate in activities such as building and maintaining vegetable gardens, assisting in food pantries, and supporting the work of existing urban farms.

Another aspect of the new food security initiative will be more exploratory.

“We want to do research that’s informed by the priorities of practitioners on the ground working with local communities,” says Schusler. “We want our research to be relevant and useful.”

To guide future research, members of the sustainable food systems team will interview leaders and staff of food justice groups to learn about the challenges they face and how Loyola can support their work.

Across campus, momentum continues to build around food equity and sustainable food systems. The 2024 Loyola Climate Change Conference focused on food security, exploring strategies for adapting to climate change and creating more resilient, sustainable, and just food systems. The event brought in a diverse group of experts to discuss global, regional, and local challenges and solutions.

“This is a really exciting time to be involved in food justice efforts on campus,” says DeMilt. “Mereya and I are excited to watch the Food Recovery Network and the food justice effort on campus expand and grow long after we both graduate.”

Read more stories from the School of Environmental Sustainability.