Reducing Food Waste at Home

• 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.
  

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.
• It may help to introduce students to the environmental impacts of food production first.
  

Differentiation

• 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.
  

This resource addresses the listed standards. To fully meet standards, search for more related resources.