Hungry To Help

It was the last Friday before finals week. In the kitchen of Fountain Dining Hall, seven students gathered around a metal table laden with trays of sliced beef, Spanish rice and creamed spinach. They spooned portions into containers, labeled them and put them to one side.

They were members of the Food Recovery Network doing their bit to reduce food insecurity on campus. The student-led network gathers at Fountain and University Towers dining halls once a week to rescue leftovers and package them into ready-to-eat meals for Feed the Pack Food Pantry and Wake County’s South Wilmington Street Shelter. The network also recovers food left over from athletics and Rave!-catered events. It donated more than 7,000 pounds of food in the 2025-26 academic year.

“We have excruciating amounts of perfectly good food that hits the garbage can just as an American society,” said Abby Mulry, the network’s former president who graduated in May. She became interested in food insecurity while on Alternative Service Break trips, including one to Rome, where she met representatives from the United Nations’ World Food Programme and the United States Mission to the U.N. It got her thinking about NC State, where student food insecurity reached 30% in 2023.

“Returning from that, I was asking myself, ‘What can I do within my community that is also struggling with this? How can I make an impact on food security now I have all of this knowledge?’” she said.

Mulry contacted the NC State Sustainability Office for ideas and learned that a group of volunteers founded a university chapter of the national Food Recovery Network in 2015. They took leftovers from NC State Dining and distributed them to organizations around Raleigh that specialize in feeding the hungry.

The chapter went dark during the COVID-19 pandemic, but technically it still existed. Mulry rallied two other students to form an executive board that could breathe new life into it. They found a willing advisor in Chad Cliffe, a campus executive chef at NC State Dining.

“Personally, I know what hunger feels like,” Cliffe said. “I’m very passionate about helping people in general. There’s enough food to help people on this campus.”

The Other Goal: Climate Change

Like all dining establishments, NC State Dining tries to generate as little waste as possible. Chefs will reuse food if they can; they don’t automatically set it aside for the Food Recovery Network, nor do they prepare food specifically for the network. That means students who show up at dining halls each Friday to package leftovers never know what they will get – maybe 70 pounds of food, maybe more than 100.

“We just can’t count on there being an overabundance of leftovers every single time. From a business standpoint, the less we have left over, the better,” Cliffe says.

Each meal prepared from leftovers weighs about 1 pound — the average weight of a meal in the United States, Mulry said — and contains a vegetable, starch and protein, whether animal or vegetable, to ensure it is as nutritious as possible.

“Each of those are theoretically like a singular meal that a patron coming to Feed the Pack can take home and pop in the microwave and eat as is,” Mulry said. “And that’s the goal: to provide not just side items but something that’s convenient for students.”

The containers are compostable to combat a side effect of food insecurity: climate change. The Environmental Protection Agency said in a 2021 report that wasted food is the single most common material in U.S. landfills, generating harmful levels of greenhouse gases. According to the United Nations, food waste and loss account for up to 10% of annual global greenhouse gas emissions. The Food Recovery Network’s efforts to address this aspect of food waste earned it an NC State Sustainability Award this year. Mulry said the network kept environmental sustainability in mind as members worked to alleviate hunger. 

“Being able to attack both of those goals at the same time by diverting that, quote, unquote, ‘waste,’ or what would have become waste, into the hands of people that can absolutely use it is a really, really great mission and something that I’ve found that a lot of people will get behind,” Mulry said.

‘Stewardship and Service’

One of the network’s goals when students return in fall is to refine a new initiative called Pack2Go that allows students to collect leftovers from Rave!-catered events. Students can sign up via a Google form and receive a notification when food is available.

“It’s taken flight, but it’s not flying yet. It’s still gaining altitude,” said Cliffe, who will remain as the network’s advisor for the upcoming academic year. “We found that it’s probably going to work at Talley Student Union the best. We had a recovery at McKimmon, and like two people showed up — it’s once removed from campus, it’s across the street, it’s not really walking distance. That’s really the goal for next semester: really getting this thing flying with momentum.”

There might be opportunities for faculty and staff to get involved with the Food Recovery Network as well. Erin McCrary, Staff Senate member and project manager in the Office of Strategic Brand Management, volunteered to help the network after it came up for discussion in a joint staff-faculty session in February. She spent a few hours at University Towers Dining Hall packing fish, broccolini and rice into containers. The Staff Senate is open to coordinating with the network to create volunteer opportunities for university employees.

“I love what they are doing for the campus,” McCrary said. “You can tell they are here because they want to help people.”

For now, however, the network remains primarily student-driven. Working with students is different from professional cooks, Cliffe said — “they just bring a different energy.” And no one embodied that more than Mulry.

“The work that Abby has done to get this thing started needs to be stated a little bit further. I can’t say enough about that young lady,” he says. “She had to deal with me. She had to deal with operating a dead nonprofit org chapter of this campus.”

But the students at the Food Recovery Network and professionals at NC State Dining share similarities, too.

“At the core of both organizations, it’s about stewardship and service,” Cliffe said. “Both organizations work with food; one just does it in a nonprofit way and one does it for profit. But we’re all here to help people, whether it be with a full experience in our dining establishments or just to fill that gap for somebody that’s in that food insecurity stage of life.”