Foods 12 Food Waste Plan

For me, there’s food waste almost everywhere I go. Most of the time at home, we don’t finish all the food we prepared for one meal and a lot of the food is either stored as leftovers or thrown away. We don’t have a compost bin and usually just throw the food into the trash. A lot of the food we buy at superstores are packaged food, so there’s a lot of paper and plastic containers that we have to sort out. At school, I buy the food from cafeteria and always finish the food. Since the food is usually on paper plates or in paper wrappings, the waste is easy to manage. Outside with friends, we often go to convenience stores such as 7-11 to buy snacks. A lot of our waste is in plastic wrappers, bottles, and cans. We usually just find a garbage can around us and throw out the trash after we’re finished with the food. There are a lot of different ways to support the environment by cutting our food waste. At home, we should start using a compost bin to sort out the food waste, since right now we just use the trash can. We can start buying less packaged food and instead buy in bulk or fresh food to have less containers that needed to be sort out. Meal planning is extremely important and can also cut the food waste by a lot, but it’s usually not me who prepares the meals at home. To improve, I can communicate with my parents and prepare a feasible meal plan every week, and perhaps do some of the cooking myself. Food storage is something that we can improve at home. A lot of foods are spoiled easily from storage problems. Some fruits and vegetables, such as bananas and tomatoes, release a gaseous plant hormone known as ethylene, and there are foods that are sensitive to ethylene and will easily go spoilt after exposure to it. Another way to reduce the food waste at home is to start preserving foods by canning, which we recently learned how to do in class. A lot of the fruits at home is left forgotten in the fruit bowl and can easily go bad. Canning will give theses fruits a longer shelf life and can save a lot of waste and money. Overall, food waste is inevitable, but there are many easy ways that we can do to reduce the waste.