Food Recovery Network Brings Efforts Back to Simpson and de Nobili After Pandemic Induced Break

The Food Recovery Network (FRN) chapter at Loyola started gathering unused food items from de Nobili Dining Hall and Simpson Dining Hall for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. 

Once a week, FRN, which is made up entirely of student volunteers, collects unused food from the dining halls on Loyola’s Lake Shore Campus (LSC) and transports it to a food pantry near the university. During the last two school years, the group has been donating food which has been left over only from Damen Dining Hall. 

Mereya Riopedre, president of FRN at Loyola, said the group’s goal is to both provide food to those in need and promote sustainability by preventing waste. Riopedre said since the group was founded at Loyola in 2016, FRN has recovered 20,177 pounds of food, which translates to approximately 23,480 meals. 

The group donates the food to A Just Harvest, a food pantry about 1.5 miles from LSC which serves the Rogers Park neighborhood. Riopedre said the group collects mostly perishable foods which were prepared but not served to students.

“We’ll get a ton of different vegetables, we’ll get a lot of pastas, a lot of meats,” Riopedre, a junior majoring in environmental studies and global studies, said. “But luckily, most things that are prepared in the dining halls are really nutritious and there’s a good variety of food there, so we get to bring a lot of different things for people in the Rogers Park community.”

The group recovered food from de Nobili and Simpson Feb. 18 for the first time in almost three years. Riopedre said FRN had to make changes to its normal operations when the COVID-19 pandemic led Loyola to close its campuses and dining halls. 

“We used to recover from all three of our dining halls as well as the dining services around Loyola, so Engrained, the Starbucks Cafes and all of those, and we also have gotten a few donations from local places like Metropolis in the past, but with COVID, all of that changed and it was much more efficient and safe to only recover from Damen,” she said.

Riopedre said it has been an ongoing effort to expand the group’s work back to the other dining halls. She said the recovery process at the other two dining halls has been slightly different from the group’s typical process in Damen.

“We send all of our student volunteers into the kitchen, which is the basement of the dining hall, and we do our typical repackaging of food,” she said. “And then once we’ve put all of that food in our transportation vehicle, we drive that over to an alley between Simpson and de Nobili, and a chef there brings out prepackaged food for us that they’ve collected throughout the week and then were able to take that straight to the food pantry.”

FRN at Loyola meets every Saturday to carry out this process. During recent semesters FRN recovers between 100 to 300 pounds of food every week, which Riopedre said translates into around 10 to 15 trays of food. 

Riopedre said FRN hopes to begin to collect unused food and divert waste from as many places on Loyola’s campus as soon as possible. 

“The goal is to recover as much food that would be wasted and feed as many people as possible,” she said. “So anywhere on campus where there is food that would be composted or thrown away, we would like to recover that.”

Featured image by Holden Green