Imagine hundreds of pounds of macaroni and cheese, roasted turkey, penne pasta with marinara, and roasted vegetables. A year ago, this surplus food—perfectly edible but never served on the buffet line in AU’s Terrace Dining Room—would have ended up in the compost bin.
While composting is more environmentally sound than the landfill, it fails to solve the immediate, human problem of hunger in Washington, DC, where one in three people is food insecure, according to the Capital Area Food Bank.
This semester, a small but determined group of students decided that better simply wasn’t good enough. They wanted the food to go to people, not just the soil.
Gabriella Selmonosky, SIS/BA ’26, who leads the AU chapter of the national Food Recovery Network, has spent years trying to bridge the gap between campus waste and community need. Since its founding, the chapter operated on a microscale, recovering small amounts of food from the campus Starbucks and farmers market. The numbers were modest; the fall 2024 semester yielded about 350 pounds of recovered food.
That changed dramatically this year. Thanks to a breakthrough partnership with the Terrace Dining Room (TDR), Chartwells, and AU’s Office of Zero Waste, the students have unlocked a massive pipeline of prepared meals. The impact has been explosive: During the fall 2025 semester, the group surpassed 6,500 pounds of recovered food.
The operation is a logistical sprint. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, volunteers rush to TDR to collect 6 to 10 large aluminum catering pans of food, which has been blast-chilled and stored in a walk-in refrigerator. A log sheet tracks the contents, packing date, and temperature—details confirmed upon delivery to ensure safety.
The team, composed of students and Office of Zero Waste staff, loads the trays into insulated bags and transports them via an AU van or an Uber—paid for by the national Food Recovery Network—to four food pantries and social service organizations across the city.
The urgency of the work is evident the moment the car doors open. Selmonosky describes drop-offs where the impact is instantaneous: “Sometimes I can see people lining up with their plates almost as soon as I’ve dropped [the food] off.”
Judy Ingram, director of Northwest Community Food, says the weekly deliveries of nutritious prepared food have been vital as other donors have scaled back. She recalls delivering beef stew to a 95-year-old woman who enjoyed it so much she requested the recipe from TDR’s chefs.
On the Friday before Thanksgiving, Teri Homicile, SOC/BA ’28 (pictured with zero waste coordinator John Boyle Ruiz, SIS/BA ’22), delivered a holiday feast’s worth of trimmings—nearly 130 pounds of stuffing, potatoes, and rice—to Northwest Community Food. For Homicile, the act of service provided a vital sense of agency: “It makes me feel purposeful—like these problems aren’t insurmountable.”
Now, instead of ending up as compost, hundreds of pounds of high-quality protein and grains are fueling the community.For Selmonosky—who grew up in Northern Virginia and started “gleaning” surplus crops from farms in middle school—this expansion is the realization of a long-held goal.
“It feels good to finally fit the definition of a traditional Food Recovery Network chapter,” she says, “and be able to put up really large recovery numbers.”