Eat up, kids. Because what you don’t buy in the cafeteria, the school deems garbage.

“We have a huge audit every year. An outside company comes in and he looks at everything. He [checks the temperature of the] food and he looks everywhere. He wants to know what we do so we have to keep records of everything,” Peggy Freund, food service manager, said.

One of the guidelines Sodexo, the food service company, must follow is throwing away food that’s left over at the end of the lunch periods.

“Once [the food] is put out on the slide and things like that, Sodexo has really strict guidelines to just get rid of it. The deli line since it’s a refrigerated line – that we can save for a couple of days if there’s any left, although we really try not to,” Freund said. “Anything that’s put out for the students has to go in the garbage at the end of the day.”

Freund admits it’s hard to see food wasted so “basically we batch cook, so we try not to have a bunch of extra food.”

Although there are some ways to keep the count of food being discarded at the end of the day down, there are still leftovers that are being wasted. Freund still believes, however, that any other alternative wouldn’t work.

“I mean giving [food away] is hard [because] then kids kind of don’t want to buy it and they wait for it. And then we don’t want to cook extra to give away or not cook enough so we don’t have to give it away,” Freund said. “We have to be very safe with the food, so part of throwing it away is a safety thing so that no one is saving it for later, getting sick off of it and food going out of temperature or anything.”