DARRINGTON, Wash. — On the lunch menu at Darrington Elementary School on Friday was the cafeteria classic: sloppy joes.
But a lot of it never made its way into kids' bellies.
"We make sure they always have enough to eat, but kids don't finish all their food," said Darrington School District Food Service Director Amy Belknap.
Here, however, students don't trash their leftovers. They're kept as a treat. None of the food at Darrington Elementary goes in the garbage.
Belknap said this one small cafeteria generates 50 pounds of waste a day.
"If you multiply that out by hotels, universities, public school systems, it's a little bit mind-boggling," she said.
According to Feeding America, we waste 92 billion pounds of food every year. That's equal to 145 billion meals. We throw away more than $473 billion worth of food annually and 38% of all the nation's food is wasted.
In Washington state, we send 1 million tons of food waste to landfills every year, but none of it comes from Darrington Elementary.
Here, one person's sloppy joe is another's slop.
All of that cafeteria food waste goes to family farms around town. Feasting on Friday were Eileen Guerzon's potbelly pigs.
"These pigs eat better than a lot of people," says Guerzon. "They eat very, very well."
Guerzon said the program saves her about $200 per month on feed alone.
"I pick up the food from the school, feed it to the pigs, which will produce fertilizer. We take that fertilizer and put it in our garden to grow our vegetables," she said.
While people complain about pork barrel politics and government waste, in Olympia, legislators recently passed a law that aims to cut the state's food waste in half by 2030 through programs like this and local composting.
The City of Darrington currently doesn't have a composting program.
Back in the lunch line, kids at Darrington Elementary alone will keep 9,000 pounds of food out of our landfills this year.
Amy Belknap hopes it's food for thought for her students.
"I hope the kids just learn the basic lesson of waste not, want not," she said.