“It was hard work, but clichés aside, we had a blast doing it.”

That’s Coogan Brennan’s reaction to a pretty unusual student activity way back in October at John Jay Dining Hall. The project: over a three-hour evening meal time, scraping and weighing leftovers from about 1,000 trays.

Brennan, ’08, says that in collaboration with Dining Services he organized about six other students – members of the Columbia Food Sustainability Project – to find out how much food was going to waste at each meal.

On the night of Oct. 5, the CFSP members gathered three huge garbage cans, one for food, one for trash and one for liquids. “We borrowed a huge scale from Barnard,” Brennan says. They scraped, dumped, poured – and then they weighed.

And these were the numbers: 450 pounds of food waste, 100 pounds of trash waste and 30 gallons of liquid waste. Students who ate at John Jay that evening were unaware of the behind-the-scene activity.

But the significant part of this ongoing effort happened on February 15 and a second round of plate-scraping at John Jay. According to Heather Tsonopoulos, Dining Services Marketing and Communications Manager, that date was chosen because the meal was exactly the same as the one served the night of the October scraping.

The results: a whopping 22 percent reduction in food waste and a 19 percent reduction in paper waste.

It’s fair to say that CFSP’s and Dining Services’ efforts to educate, create awareness and ultimately reduce waste are taking hold.

Susie Fein, Dining Services Assistant Manager, Nutrition and Marketing, says she’s been at Columbia for a year and a half, eating lunch every day at John Jay. She describes the amount of wasted food as “tremendous,” and points out that because students serve themselves and have an all-you-can-eat meal plan, “they have the power to take as much as they can.”

Since the October scraping project and its informational follow up, Fein says there’s been lots of conversation and “an extremely positive response” from students.

Dining Services’ grateful response to students will take place on May 3, Tsonopoulos says. The menu: steak and shrimp.