At public schools across the country, a lot of food gets wasted while other students go hungry. So some schools are creating “share tables” to eliminate food waste and feed hungry students. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which runs the federal lunch program, calls share tables “an innovative strategy to encourage the consumption of nutritious foods and reduce food waste.”
The idea is simple, students drop off any unopened food or drinks they don’t want and those things stay on the share table for any student to eat or drink if they want to. Anything left at the end of the day gets donated to a local food bank, charity, or in some schools they send leftover share table items home with kids whose families could use some extra help.
“Students that are maybe less fortunate than others, don’t have a lunch or a snack at school lunch, they can come up and take fruit or we’ve seen things like chips and yogurt come off the tables,” explains eighth-grader Nick Iannone, who started a share table at his school in Wallingford, Connecticut. Let’s hope share tables start showing up in all the school cafeterias.
Source: Scary Mommy