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Sum Hye

Food waste has significant environmental consequences, contributing to approximately 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions and wasting vital resources such as water and energy. In response, various measures are being implemented, including optimizing food purchasing, adjusting portion sizes, and establishing food-sharing initiatives in schools to reduce waste. Collaborative efforts among consumers, retailers, producers, and authorities are essential for achieving substantial reductions in food waste and ensuring a sustainable future.

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12 views2 pages

Sum Hye

Food waste has significant environmental consequences, contributing to approximately 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions and wasting vital resources such as water and energy. In response, various measures are being implemented, including optimizing food purchasing, adjusting portion sizes, and establishing food-sharing initiatives in schools to reduce waste. Collaborative efforts among consumers, retailers, producers, and authorities are essential for achieving substantial reductions in food waste and ensuring a sustainable future.

Uploaded by

Md. Shamiul
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Text B: Ugly truth of food waste

Across cultures, food waste goes against the moral grain. After all, nearly 800 million people
worldwide suffer from hunger. But according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the
United Nations, we squander enough food—globally, 2.9 trillion pounds a year—to feed every
one of them more than twice over. Where’s all that food—about a third of the planet’s
production—going? In developing nations much is lost postharvest for lack of adequate storage
facilities, good roads, and refrigeration. In comparison, developed nations waste more food
farther down the supply chain, when retailers order, serve, or display too much and when
consumers ignore leftovers in the back of the fridge or toss perishables before they’ve expired.
Wasting food takes an environmental toll as well. Producing food that no one eats—whether
sausages or snickerdoodles—also squanders the water, fertilizer, pesticides, seeds, fuel, and land
needed to grow it. The quantities aren’t trivial. Globally a year’s production of uneaten food
guzzles as much water as the entire annual flow of the Volga, Europe’s most voluminous river.
Growing the 133 billion pounds of food that retailers and consumers discard in the United States
annually slurps the equivalent of more than 70 times the amount of oil lost in the Gulf of
Mexico’s Deepwater Horizon disaster, according to American Wasteland author Jonathan
Bloom. All stages of food production require some sort of energy. On the farm, tractors use fuel,
and it takes a decent amount of power to operate irrigation systems. Food processing equipment
and refrigeration systems (i.e., the supply chain) also require power. In fact, the food supply
chain itself accounted for about 11% of the total annual energy use in America between 2004 and
2015. All this energy is depleted for nothing if the food is not consumed. These staggering
numbers don’t even include the losses from farms, fishing vessels, and slaughterhouses. Sending
wasted food “down the drain” to later be treated as wastewater, throwing it in landfills, or
incinerating it is a poor way of recycling because it produces significant methane emissions.
Food loss and waste accounts for a huge chunk of global greenhouse gas emissions: upwards of
10%, according to the United Nations. If food waste were a country, it would be the third largest
producer of greenhouse gases in the world, after China and the U.S. On a planet of finite
resources, with the expectation of at least two billion more residents by 2050, this profligacy,
Tristram Stuart argues in his book Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal, is obscene.
Others have been making similar arguments for years, but reducing food waste has become a
matter of international urgency. In most wealthy nations, including the United States, consumers
are the largest source of food waste. In 2022, the average American spent $759 on food that went
uneaten. All together consumer food waste accounts for more than 48% of surplus food in the
U.S. at a cost of $252 billion. It's also the equivalent of more than 71 billion meals that could
have gone to people in need. Some U.S. schools, where children dump up to 40 percent of their
lunches into the trash, are setting up sharing tables, letting students serve themselves portions
they know they’ll eat, allotting more time for lunch, and scheduling it after recess—all proven
methods of boosting consumption. Countless businesses, such as grocery stores, restaurants, and
cafeterias, have stepped forward to combat waste by quantifying how much edible food isn’t
consumed, optimizing their purchasing, shrinking portion sizes, and beefing up efforts to move
excess to charities. It is up to us to decrease wastage of food. Measures to combat food waste are
more effective when consumers, retailers, producers and authorities work together. A substantial
reduction in food waste is a key condition to sustainable future.
(a) Summarise the environmental consequences of wasting food and the steps taken to
reduce it, according to Text B. (20)
You must use continuous writing (not note form).
Use your own words where appropriate.
Avoid copying long sections of the text.
Your summary should be no more than 150 words.
Up to 10 marks are available for the content of your answer and up to 10 marks for the
quality of your writing.

(b) Imagine you are a high school student. You are interviewed by a local news programme
about the mitigation of food waste at consumer level.
Give your answer to the interviewer’s question, using information from the text.
Interviewer’s question: Some people think that students can do a lot to decrease the
amount of food wasted at consumer level.
What is your opinion and why? (5)

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