Northwestern Community Development Corps aimed to show students the importance of “cleaning their plates” to help prevent worldwide hunger Monday as part of the group’s Hunger Awareness Week.

A food weigh-in took place at Allison dining room hall during lunch and Sargent dining hall during dinner. Standing at the tray return window, volunteers scraped leftovers from plates into trash cans and weighed them periodically, eventually reaching a total of 215 pounds of food wasted by NU diners. The totals were listed on a poster that recorded the pounds of waste every 15 minutes.

Program organizer Joe Curnow said she hoped the event would open students’ eyes to wasteful eating trends.

“(The program) makes people aware of their consumption patterns,” said Curnow, an Education sophomore, who added that the purpose was not to say the food “could go to the children in Africa.

It’s more about being aware of how much we consume, how much we waste as individuals,” he said.

Curnow said NCDC decided to organize the weigh-in after she learned that similar efforts on college campuses around the country had been successful in helping students reflect upon their waste habits.

“This isn’t about guilt,” Curnow said. “It’s just making people think critically about the choices they make.”

Just as students have different eating habits, the amount of food thrown away by individuals on Monday varied dramatically. Trash on trays ranged from a few chicken bones to whole slices of pizza and entire cookies. After two hours of lunch at Allison, diners discarded more than 100 pounds of leftover food.

Several students at Allison said they were intrigued by the situation but didn’t envision that the program could transform their eating patterns.

“I waste probably more than the average person,” said Zach Brennan, a Weinberg freshman. “My eyes are bigger than my stomach. But I think my eating habits are all right.”

By 7:15 p.m. at Sargent, two trash bags held mounds of uneaten food that weighed 112 pounds. Many students said they throw away food because they put it on their plates and later discover that it does not taste good.

“There were some scalloped potatoes,” said Communication freshman Jessica Smith, “but I don’t think they were really scalloped potatoes, so I didn’t eat them.”

SodexhoUSA employee Jon Mitchell said trays at Sargent often are full of uneaten food.

“They shouldn’t waste (it),” he said. “There’s a child starving right now.”

Thomas Kim, a Weinberg sophomore who helped run the weigh-in, said some students questioned how the event would help the hunger problem. But such events can help pave the way to action by sparking awareness, he said.

“The first step to solving the problem,” Kim said, “is to make people more aware of it.”