Huskie Harvest helps use more than 1,000 pounds of food for NIU students

DeKALB – Huskie Harvest, a Northern Illinois University initiative created in an effort to feed food insecure students has repacked more than 1,000 pounds of food that was destined to be wasted in fewer than three months.

Nancy Prange, director of dietetic internships at the NIU in DeKalb, said she began recovering food through Huskie Harvest on Feb. 1, because she wanted to help students with an issue she thinks is often overlooked. More than 500 pounds of food was recovered in the first month, Prange said.

“We do have a food insecurity issue on campus and this is, you know, nationwide,” Prange said. “A lot of times we think if you can afford to go to college you should be able to afford to eat but that’s not always the case. When students have to make decisions between buying books and buying food, paying rent or buying food, it can impact both their health as well as their education.”

Huskie Harvest doesn’t just provide a benefit to food insecure individuals on campus, but it also allows food that would otherwise have been earmarked for the trash to be recovered and eaten. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, about a third of the food intended for human consumption in the U.S. ends up as waste.

“This kind of came out of a couple of classes within my public health degree and so the idea was really to decrease food waste and then also be able to help support our students that are hungry,” Prange said.

Prange, who earned her master’s and doctorate degrees in public health at NIU, has been on campus for 14 years. She said she used her connections to get the program going – namely Dan Koenen, executive director of campus dining.

“Without campus dining’s support, this program could not happen,” Prange said.

“A lot of times we think if you can afford to go to college you should be able to afford to eat but that’s not always the case. When students have to make decisions between buying books and buying food, paying rent or buying food, it can impact both their health as well as their education.”

—  Nancy Prange, director of dietetic internships at the NIU

Koenen has been on campus for six years and said during that time he’s held discussions with campus officials and faculty about running a similar program.

“As we came out of [COVID-19], we were back on campus, put our heads together and said let’s do this,” Koenen said. “[Prange] was able to get student volunteers to pack and label the food. We made it available to them anytime we had a catering event and had leftover food.”

Dietetic interns seeking to become registered dietitians have to do more than 1,000 hours of supervised practice experience, so Prange worked the Huskie Harvest program into the rotation of experiences her interns have.

Prange’s interns aren’t collecting scraps from dining options open to students. Instead, they’re called in after there’s an event with food catering services.

“Most events are kind of a buffet style, which when you prepare for a buffet you have to over produce food so there’s kind of planned leftovers,” Prange said. “So this is food that previously in February would have just been thrown away.”

Koenen said anytime a campus catering event has leftovers, the excess food is brought back to the kitchen and placed in coolers. Then he calls Prange to say there’s food available to be packaged for Huskie Harvest.

When dietetic interns arrive, they freeze and package the food with a Huskie Harvest label that includes the name of the item, the main ingredients, any allergens and the date it was frozen, as well as reheating instructions. Once the food packaged, it’s brought to the Huskie Food Pantry, where twice a week students can take as many meals as they want.

“This program can help students have one less hard decision to make, so that they can have the food that they need,” Prange said. “But it’s not just about calories or just any kind of food, it’s about nutritious quality food. That is what makes someone food secure, knowing where their next meal is coming from and the quality and the nutrition value of that meal is healthy.”

As of April 19, Prange said the Huskie Harvest had packed more than 1,000 recovered food items – weighing more than 1,000 pounds – for the Huskie Food Pantry.

While feeding hungry members of the community is the priority, there’s also an environmental benefit to reducing food waste.

“When you look at a landfill, the number one producer of greenhouse gasses is food – specifically in a landfill,” Prange said. “So the less food that we send to the landfill the lower our carbon footprint and the better for our environment. NIU is really trying to reduce our carbon footprint and be more sustainable, so this fits into that mission as well.”