This article provides several ideas and strategies for curbing food waste at the household level, which helps save money and reduce emissions.
It includes instructions on how to store various types of foods to help them last longer, provides tips for shopping, meals, and gatherings, suggests recipes for using up food items, and discusses composting and food donation in Wisconsin.
Teaching Tips
Positives
This resource is accessible to students at a variety of levels and ages.
Students will benefit from the non-fiction text features embedded in this resource.
Additional Prerequisites
Students should have some understanding of what food waste is and the impacts of food waste.
Cross-curricular connections can be made in health classes that are considering how healthy eating habits may correlate with reducing food waste and taking action on climate change.
After reviewing this resource, have students log their own food waste for a week. What trends did they notice? How much food did the entire class throw away? What meals had the most or least wasted food? Were certain types of food wasted more than others?
One engaging way to curb food waste at school would be to use the information from this resource to create posters for the cafeteria and for students to take home nonperishable leftovers in their lunchboxes.
As an extension, have students create a presentation to share with their families about how they can reduce food waste in their homes.
Advanced students can use the Food Data Explorer to gather data about the environmental impacts of food production and then calculate their reduction in carbon emissions from reducing food waste over a calendar year.
Scientist Notes
This resource does not have any specific science to review but has been developed by qualified individuals and is recommended for teaching.
Standards
Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)
ESS3: Earth and Human Activity
MS-ESS3-3 Apply scientific principles to design a method for monitoring and minimizing a human impact on the environment.
MS-ESS3-4 Construct an argument supported by evidence for how increases in human population and per-capita consumption of natural resources impact Earth's systems.
Common Core English Language Arts Standards (CCSS.ELA)
Reading: Informational Text (K-12)
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.6.1 Cite textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.6.2 Determine a central idea of a text and how it is conveyed through particular details; provide a summary of the text distinct from personal opinions or judgments.
