Reducing food waste isn’t just good for the environment; it can be good for society and the economy, too.
Led by Jonathan Deutsch, professor and director of Drexel University’s cutting-edge culinary arts and food science program, Drexel Food Lab students are playing a part in an innovative new program that seeks to repurpose food with two goals in mind: feeding the hungry and creating economic opportunities for supermarkets. As part of the program, launched in West Philadelphia in concert with Brown’s Super Stores and the University of Pennsylvania, students took more than 15,000 pounds of food that was approaching its use-by date and would ordinarily be wasted—including bruised, brown bananas—and turned it into delicious, healthy dishes that could be used locally to help ameliorate hunger. The bananas, for example, were pureed, frozen and turned into banana ice cream.
