Food service operations in an all-you-care-to-eat environment need to consider two conflicting objectives: a desire to reduce overproduction food waste (and its corresponding environmental impacts), and an aversion to shortfalls (in which some customer demands go unsatisfied). We’ll show how operations research concepts can be used to help decision makers address the efficient allocation of scarce resources to achieve stated objectives (i.e., how to operationalize the basic economic question of life). Part of the Saturday Morning Science Series