UVa students repurpose food for the needy

University of Virginia students Atlee Webber and Anna Karnaze are chopping locally grown cucumbers and bell peppers in the kitchen of Runk Dining Hall. The veggies will soon be mixed into a salad to accompany servings of beef stroganoff that will be delivered to three families living in transitional housing.

The students are part of a growing club at UVa called Campus Kitchen that collects unused food from the university’s dining halls, as well as produce from the Local Food Hub, and cooks up meals for Charlottesville-area residents in need.

The beef stroganoff and side salads prepared by Webber and Karnaze on a recent Tuesday were sent to three single mothers, each with three children, living in Charlottesville’s Hope House, a four-unit apartment building for homeless families trying to transition to more permanent housing.

On Wednesdays, the student volunteers cook up 30 meals that are delivered to On Our Own, a peer support organization in Charlottesville that helps its members recover from homelessness, addiction and mental illness. On Sundays, a larger group of Campus Kitchen’s 30 student volunteers cook and deliver between 85 and 100 meals to the Salvation Army’s soup kitchen.

“We try to cook up a balanced meal every time, with a starch, a protein, a vegetable and sometimes a dessert,” said Karnaze, a third-year student in UVa’s Curry School of Education.

Karnaze decided to volunteer with Campus Kitchen, she said, because she saw it as a chance to alleviate hunger in Charlottesville and be a bridge between UVa students and the surrounding community.

“Charlottesville has a big rate of poverty and hunger,” she said. “[UVa students] aren’t really aware of that.”

Webber, meanwhile, was attracted to Campus Kitchen because of its sustainability aspect.

“We’re using food that is already there,” she said. “We’re not just buying new food. We’re sort of rescuing it and putting it to good use.”

For this recent Tuesday’s meal, the students used some spaghetti that had been cooked earlier by UVa’s dining staff. The salad’s vegetables — green peppers, tomatoes and cucumbers — were provided by the nonprofit Local Food Hub in exchange for the students’ help with administrative volunteer work.

Josh Windley, executive chef of Runk Dining Hall, works with the students, helping them plan menus and teaching them about basic kitchen safety, such as knife skills and being careful around hot objects.

Windley pointed out that the students are not using leftovers per se from UVa’s dining hall, but instead unused portions that would otherwise be repurposed as some other meal.

His key role in helping the Campus Kitchen volunteers, he said, is “making them aware of what they have to work with.”

The volunteers recently had meatballs and marinara sauce, he recalled. They were trying to decide if they should make meatball subs or spaghetti and meatballs.

“I asked them, so, what do you have?”

“We have some pasta,” they replied.

“Then, you’re making spaghetti and meatballs,” he said.

UVa Dining does not contribute food that is more likely to spoil, such as fish. The department’s donations tend to be pasta, chopped steak and chicken.

“It’s been great,” Windley said. “I enjoy seeing the enthusiasm of the students coming in here, devoting their time to a good cause and being aware of what’s going on outside the university.”

As a chef, he added, it has been rewarding to watch students learn to cook.

“I’ve burned a couple vegetables accidentally,” Karnaze admits. “It’s been a learning process.”

The Campus Kitchen Project is a national organization that has chapters at 25 colleges and universities. UVa’s program is one of three in Virginia, the others being at Washington and Lee University and the College of William & Mary.