When lunch ends at Harding High School on St. Paul’s East Side, the kitchen staff sorts through the leftovers.
On a recent Thursday, Natia Agate filled up several large aluminum take-out trays with extra sweet potato fries, pasta, meatballs, and marinara sauce.
The food was bound for Catholic Charities where it helps feed hundreds of needy diners, part of a partnership between St. Paul Public Schools and the charity to prevent food waste by getting it those in need. The relationship began with the help of a grant from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA), which aims to take on a prevalent and particularly harmful form of waste.
Agate separated out another pan of sweet potatoes that didn’t look good enough to redistribute.
“We only send the best quality food we can,” said Erin George, Harding’s nutrition services supervisor. “If we know it’s not going to reheat well, or it’s mushy, we don’t send it.”
Unused food makes up a significant part of Minnesota’s waste stream and has a negative impact on landfills and incinerators that process trash, according to Tabitha Birdwell, a sustainable materials management specialist with the MPCA.
A 2019 MPCA study that examined food waste at six sites statewide found that 95% of food and compostable material in the trash could have been diverted and 46% could have been eaten or donated.
“There’s a lot of opportunity to prevent the harmful impacts of putting that in the landfill,” Birdwell said.
The most beneficial of those opportunities is taking food that would otherwise become waste and serving it to the hungry. George has been a culinary worker in St. Paul Public Schools for 20 years, and followed in her mother’s footsteps to become a second generation lunch lady in the district. Donating leftover food has always been part of the job, George said, but the MPCA grant enables district staff to take the food directly to Catholic Charities. It’s the easiest a food rescue system has been for kitchen workers, she said.
“Once I see them pick it up, I’m happy because I know there’s families in need,” George said.
Addressing a potent form of waste
Food waste can be composted, or better yet, used before it goes bad, Birdwell said. Two methods are donating unwanted food to farmers who can feed it to livestock, or donating it to organizations who feed the hungry, often called food rescue.
Unused food has a harmful environmental impact once it enters the waste stream, Birdwell said. In landfills, food waste is the primary source of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that drives climate change. In incinerators, food waste gets other materials wet, and releases volatile organic compounds when burned.
Across the U.S., food makes up about a quarter of all waste and accounts for 58% of the methane emissions produced in landfills, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
The MPCA has distributed $500,000 worth of food rescue grants annually since 2019. That figure was boosted with an additional $3.5 million in one-time funding from the Minnesota Legislature in 2024. The state has also secured $12.5 million in grants from the EPA to further boost the program for the next four years, Birdwell said. The state believes the funding is still in place despite cuts in Washington by the Trump administration.
“The best thing to do with food waste is to prevent it from happening in the first place,” Birdwell said.
St. Paul Public Schools received a $924,000 grant from the MPCA to run through next school year. The funding helps the district track its food to understand how it can be a better steward of funding and food waste, according to nutrition services director Stacy Koppen.
“It’s both our right and our responsibility to use these dollars to the best of our ability,” Koppen said.
An efficient partnership
Inside the central kitchen at Catholic Charities Dorothy Day campus in downtown St. Paul, Chef Mike DeJong leaned over a massive, bubbling cauldron and tasted a spoonful of chicken stir fry.
“It’s not bad, it’s really sweet,” DeJong said.
The cauldron held the main lunch course that fed about 250 people in need on April 29. The chicken in the pot came from St. Paul Public Schools. The stir fry is a favorite meal for guests, DeJong said, and is served over lo mein noodles.
Catholic Charities serves about 1 million free meals a year, mostly using food either donated or provided at greatly reduced cost by wholesalers and food banks. About 20% of the food comes from food rescue programs from restaurants, food banks and now St. Paul Schools*.
“It’s different from restaurants because we work from donations, so we never really know what’s coming in,” DeJong siad.
The food from St. Paul Schools is more predictable than most donations. The district has set menus and rotations and Catholic Charities has a better idea of what to expect.
Catholic Charities’ central kitchen’s large walk-in freezer is stuffed full of donations, which come in constantly. DeJong and his staff examine the new food as it comes in and decide what needs to be used within 24 hours, and what can wait.
“We actually need more freezer space than we do cooler space most of the time,” DeJong said.
Harding High serves lunch to between 920 and 1050 kids a day, George said. Favorite lunches include sambusas, which they’ve offered since school resumed after the COVID pandemic, and Italian dunkers, a mozzarella stick-adjacent classic many Minnesota public school graduates can taste in their memories.
On May 8, Harding debuted a penne pasta with turkey meatballs dish and, despite being well received by students, there were plenty of leftovers because the staff was serving it for the first time.
The extra pasta, meatballs and sauce were placed in to-go trays and labeled. Agate brought the items to the walk-in freezer. The food is recorded on an app, and within a day, district workers will come pick it up. The system is so seamless that George said she often doesn’t notice them come.
“To me, this is the best thing we can do. Because there are people who need it,” George said.
School districts are in a tough position with food purchasing. They need to make sure they have enough to meet students’ needs and can’t run out of food, Koppen said. But the schools usually have plenty leftover after lunchtime.
“It’s shameful to see that go into the waste stream when there’s so many hungry people,” Koppen said.
St. Paul Schools used to partner with Second Harvest Heartland, one of the state’s largest food banks, to rescue unused food. But the system was run by volunteers and often plans would fall through, according to Jill Westlund, nutrition coordinator with St. Paul Public Schools. The effort had some success, with about 70,000 pounds of food donated last school year. But the MPCA grant and relationship with Catholic Charities that began this school year has made the district’s food rescue efforts far more efficient.
The district started its Catholic Charities program with a pilot program at a few schools, Westlund said, and rescued 50,000 pounds of food by February. Since mid-February, all 65 schools have been participating and the district says another 50,000 pounds has been donated.
District staff are the ones collecting food from the central kitchen and 65 schools across the city. They know where all the loading docks are and can move faster than volunteers, Westlund said.
“We know from beginning to end that it’s being done well,” Westlund.
*Clarification: This story has been update to more accurately reflect Catholic Charities’ food sources.
