In some of Penn’s dining halls, the food is all-you-can-eat. It’s almost too easy for diners to have eyes bigger than their stomachs, piling on any dish that looks appealing, then tossing the leftovers away at the end of their meal.

This waste isn’t trivial. A recent study of one of the campus dining halls by a group of undergraduates found that the average patron threw out two-thirds of a pound of food per meal. The daily food wasted at dinner alone at the dining hall weighed in at a whopping 140 pounds. That’s enough to feed well over 100 people.

At “The Last Food Mile Conference,” to be held Monday, Dec. 8, to Tuesday, Dec. 9, at Houston Hall, speakers will bring awareness to the problem of food waste and share ideas about how to solve it at all stages of the food production and distribution supply chain, from processing to distribution to consumption.

Zhengxia Dou, a professor of agriculture systems at the School of Veterinary Medicine, is chair of the conference organizing committee. She helped Penn Vet win a $49,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to host the conference.

“When we talk about food waste, there are three main dimensions,” Dou explains. “One is an economic issue. The amount of food the U.S. population wastes annually has a retail value of $161 billion. It is huge. It’s also an environmental issue, with so many resources consumed and then the food waste going into the landfill. And finally, it’s a moral issue. While we are wasting so much food, nearly 50 million people are living in food-insecure households in the United States.”

The conference brings together experts from the food and restaurant industry, the federal government, and the nonprofit sector, along with scholars in nutrition, agriculture, public health, law, and business, to bring light to the scope of the problem and discuss work that is being done to reduce food waste and recover unused food, routing it to higher uses, including feeding people suffering from hunger.

Dou hopes the event will provide an impetus to push along changing practices and attitudes with respect to food production, perhaps starting right here on campus.

“We’re already in talks with Penn’s food service provider, Bon Appétit, to start a program to recover food that is prepared but not served and use it to feed hungry people,” she says. “By bringing awareness and education to this issue, we can change human behaviors. It’s going to take time and a lot of work, but that work is desperately needed.”

Penn faculty and staff can register at a discounted rate of $50, and students for $20 at the conference website. The registration deadline is Sunday, Nov. 30.