Rat Snacks Food Rescue Turns Doomed Food Into Tasty Treats
Jasper Everingham | October 6, 2022
Willow Solomon
Rat Snacks Food Rescue is a partnership between Box of Baguettes — a free food pantry located in Lower Gladfelter — and the CORE (Community Oriented Regeneration Efforts) Crew. The project started as a solution to reduce food waste at Warren Wilson College (WWC) that comes from Box of Baguettes. The current Box of Baguettes organizer, Sam Colston, noticed that some food was being taken more quickly than others.
Colston wrote in a student information board posting: “while the snacks and drinks seem to disappear in a single shift, the produce wilts away on the bottom shelf.”
Willow Solomon
Elias Goldstein, the CORE crew supervisor, said that because Box of Baguettes relies on surplus food, it can also be difficult to predict how much food (and what type) they are going to have from week to week.
“It seems like a lot of times, they get way more stuff than they anticipated they were gonna get,” Goldstein said. “Which is how you end up with 90 pounds of benevolent bacon in the freezer. Over the summer we got [about] 300 pounds of frozen mac and cheese that obviously couldn't fit in the freezers, and then they also got — we didn’t end up weighing it but it was like 30 or 40 boxes of already expired melon.”
Rylee Langdon, a member of the Bonner Leaders Crew who has been working extensively with Box of Baguettes, said that there are a lot of reasons why people wouldn’t take produce as well.
“We get a lot of fresh produce that we can’t always use right away, people don't always get to right away,” Langdon said. “Sometimes they don't have time to go cook it. So the aim of Rat Snacks is basically to help facilitate that by cooking all this food and being able to give it out.”
By reducing this kind of waste and in doing so fight food insecurity on campus, Rat Snacks hopes to solve two problems with one answer.
“Not everyone has access to off campus food needs like groceries,” Colston said. “Gladfelter does provide a lot of food throughout the day, but they do close at 7 p.m.”
Colston said that students are often hungry after 7 p.m. and that unless they can get food on their own, there aren’t options for them on campus.
“There's lots of ways where the meal plan doesn't meet the needs of the campus and students need to have a little bit more sovereignty when it comes to feeding themselves,” Colston said.
Rat Snacks has already attracted attention and volunteers. Forest Fulford, a freshman at WWC, said that they hope the program can become a way to build community rooted in reducing food waste and fighting food insecurity.
Willow Solomon
“We live in a society that just has so much abundance, and at the same time, so much food insecurity,” Fulford said. “Generally colleges are a place with a lot of wealth, but I think it's just important to be engaged in work that is closing holes in our food system, ending food waste, putting food that would just go to a landfill to use feeding people.”
Rat Snacks Food Rescue is currently giving out food every Friday outside of Gladfelter between 12:00 p.m. and 2:00 p.m.