LI Student Creates App To Reduce Wasted Meals In School Cafeterias

GLEN HEAD, NY — Everybody "knows" that there's a lot of food wasted in school cafeterias. Arjun Bindra, a senior at Jericho High School, decided to get past the anecdotes, research the reality and do something about it.

"It’s one of the largest problems in food waste," he told Patch. "I actually have the stats. It was 530,000 tons annually from US schools — which was a humongous problem."

So while thinking globally, Bindra decided to act locally. He developed an app that uses data from students and faculty to analyze lunch ingredients to create the most sustainable, low-cost, and best-tasting menus for schools.

The app uses data to track which menu items are bought the least and discarded the most by students. It then breaks down menu items and revamps meals to create new menus that have similar nutritional content.

Some of his findings from using the app at JHS were surprising.

"There's a lot of food waste, a lot of dishes go uneaten," the Glen Head resident told Patch. But though people think whole meals are being thrown away, a lot of time it's not the whole thing.

"A single part of the dish is consistently wasted by multiple students," he said.

A lot of the time it was vegetables.

"Which seems obvious, but it was when vegetable was offered as is," he said. "If vegetables were placed in burgers or pastas they tended to perform much better. They were usually not wasted. A vegetable would perform better if there was another layer of flavor."

Bindra has a passion for saving the environment.

He founded Evergreen, an organization that creates youth-designed solutions for food waste and agriculture-caused emissions and climate change.

Coming from a family of Indian farmers, Bindra wanted to tap back into his roots, honor them and explore agriculture.

"Food waste and food in general were always important to me," he said. "Across the world farmers are treated not as well as they should be. They see climate change way more than us in urbanized areas. It affects their livelihood. In a lot of the world, farmers are the ones who go hungry, which I thought was really sad."

He was recently awarded the NSHSS Foundation Earth Day Scholarship, given by the National Society of High School Scholars Foundation. This award recognizes students who actively raise awareness and protect our planet through projects and activities in their schools and communities.

"I think the faculty at Jericho was by far the biggest help in everything," he said, praising the encouraging environment they create. "They inspire people to make change."

Bindra's latest interest: fertilizers. Most are synthetic, but innovators are trying to create fertilizers out of waste instead. "In the next month I'm going to look deeper into distribution of nutrients in the soil."

In the fall, he heads to Stanford University with a major in Earth Systems and an academic concentration in Sustainable Food & Agriculture. With new resources like research labs at Stanford, he hopes to expand Evergreen's range of projects and its positive impact on global food systems.

"I would like to keep studying something that applies to or is agriculture-related," Bindra said. That includes cognitive science, engineering, technology and the intersections with social and political movements. "It's connected," he said.