Eighth grade science teacher Caroline Feldman ’05 lit up when she heard that her former student, Elise Dadourian ’16, had made a documentary about food waste for her senior year thesis at Brown. The film would fit perfectly into Feldman’s unit on food and sustainability, so she quickly created a lesson plan to incorporate her former student’s work into her science unit.

 

Dadourian’s documentary, The Global Waste Crisis and The Danish Solution, focuses on food-waste reduction in Denmark, a global leader in food sustainability. Dadourian first became interested in the relationship between food and the environment in a U.S. history course while she was still a student at Shipley. It was Copenhagen’s reputation as one of the most sustainable cities in the world that initially attracted Dadourian to study abroad there, and a new course in food sustainability being offered in the Danish capital would tie in perfectly with her senior thesis.

“In the Autumn of 2018, I began planning my senior thesis,” wrote Dadourian, an environmental studies major. “A documentary seemed the natural way to combine environmental science and film, my two fields of study. I chose to focus on food waste in particular because it seemed like something easy to fix. When it comes to combating the climate crisis and decreasing carbon footprints, food waste is the “low-hanging fruit.”Thwarting its effects requires no new technology or political revolution; it merely requires a change in the attitudes and behaviors of individuals.”