Because breakfast is not an «offer vs. serve» meal (i.e., students must take all parts of the meal for it to be reimbursable by the federal government), there's a huge amount of waste, and one of the
most valuable aspects of Lisa's blog has been her photos of the untouched
food routinely discarded by the students from the breakfast — tables full of sealed milk and juice cartons,
uneaten whole fruit and unopened packaged
foods all headed for the trash (see, e.g., here and here).
Respondents said that holding taste tests with students and redistributing
uneaten, sealed
foods were among the
most effective ways to reduce waste, but only 44 percent and 38 percent of programs, respectively, used these strategies.