Leftovers are being put to good use at NAIT

Culinary students at NAIT are partnering up with LeftOvers to reduce food waste. Saturday evening, students cooked meals for guests using only ingredients that would normally be thrown out by retailers and restaurants around the city. Volunteers from the organization collect this food and bring it to a service that can use it.

This is the first time NAIT’s culinary program, which graduates a hundred students a year into the food and service industry, has partnered with this organization for an event. NAIT Culinary Department Head, Jeff Gordon says this is a good experience for students to learn “how leftovers works and how they can continue to work with them as they move out into the community.”

While tickets were available to the public for this event, usually LeftOvers donates its food to charities that are in need of food donations, such as the Food Bank or the Mustard Seed.

According to LeftOvers, nearly a third of the food produced worldwide is wasted each year. In Canada, food waste can be broken down into six main contributors.

1. Consumers (47%)
2. Processing (20%)
3. On-Farm (10%)
4. Retail (10%)
5. Restaurants & Hotels (9%)
6. Transportation & Distribution (4%)

LeftOvers, which started in Calgary five years ago, began operating here in Edmonton at the beginning of the year. Gordon says now that he knows that they’re here, he hopes to “continue that relationship and figure out the logistics of how [they] can utilize LeftOvers at NAIT” in the future.

LeftOvers collects food from at least 55 different donors and work with 32 different charities to ensure they can use as much food as possible. Currently, they are rescuing about 4,000 pounds of food a week between the two cities.

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