Food Waste Audit

In this lesson, students will:

• collect data on how much food they waste each meal.
• analyze and interpret student-collected data.
• design some solutions for preventing food waste.

• Decide which meal your students will collect data.
• Print one Food Waste Audit worksheet per student
• Determine how you will collate your class data.

1. Instruct students they will be collecting data to learn about their own food waste after a meal.
   
2. Assign a meal time students will be looking at their food waste: lunch or dinner are highly recommended.
   
3. Demonstrate how to use the Food Waste Audit worksheet to document the data. Each day of the week students will:
   • Check off the type of food wasted after their meal. If there are other types of food not listed, have students write it in under the "Other" section.
   • Write in the reason why the food was wasted. Examples of reasons include "I don't like it," "I didn't have to time to eat it," "Food was damaged or looked bruised," or "I was full."
     
4. At the end of the collecting data time frame, have students write down the patterns they notice in the foods they wasted and the reasons why they threw them away.

Ask students:

• Are there other data, measurements, or information that would be helpful in assessing food waste?
• What was challenging about doing the Food Waste Audit?
• What might you try differently next time?

The global food demand is projected to increase by 60%-100% by 2050 as preferences shift towards richer diets. We can address at least part of the future demand by growing more crops, but meeting the world's needs will require as much attention to our diets, reducing food waste, and improving food security worldwide.

Worldwide, we grow enough food to meet everyone's needs, but food waste dramatically reduces the available food supply. That's a problem for global food security as well as our climate, given the huge amounts of greenhouse gases that go into producing the wasted food. An estimated 25% of the world's food calories and up to 50% of total food weight are lost or wasted before they are consumed.

But the food we directly throw away as consumers is simply one layer of the problem. The majority of the environmental impact of food waste is not from the food rotting in the refrigerator or spoiling in a field. Deep impacts stem from the agricultural resources needed to grow the food in the first place. Wasted food means that we waste all of the resources that went into agricultural production, like fertilizer, water, and energy.