Causes and immediate effects of the current food waste crisis

Introduction

An estimated of 1.3 billion tons of food, about 30 percent of global production, is lost or wasted

annually while 800 billion go hungry. Much of this waste happens in the United States.

According to Oliver Milman, a writer for

The Guardian

, Americans waste about a pound

of food per person each day []. About 150,000 tons of food is tossed out in US households each

day, equivalent to about a third of the daily calories that each American consumes.

The numbers are shocking. But there is something we can all do about it. In this classroom, we

find young students who will soon inherit this crisis, we find parents who do the grocery

shopping and cooking in the household, and we find some who work at restaurants or grocery

stores. In the end, we are all consumers of food, and it is my hope that this unit will get us to

consider our consumption, and more specifically what we dont end up consuming, more closely

and carefully.

With this assignment, we will address the food waste epidemic by analyzing its core causes and

effects while considering ways that we can advocate for solutions and change.

Reading and Writing Skills

Over the course of this assignment, we will continue to work on developing key academic

reading and writing skills, which you will use throughout your career as a student and which

constitute the basis of most scholarly writing. We will be annotating and close reading texts,

dissecting parts of argument, evaluating different types of sources, taking into consideration the

purpose and audience of our writing, and finally creating our own arguments by developing

strong thesis statements, incorporating sources into our argument and thoroughly explaining

and analyzing evidence to convince our intended audience of our argument and to hopefully

make a change.

Focusing Questions

Now that you briefly understand what we are doing with this assignment and why we are doing

it, I will now introduce our guiding questions. Through our reading and writing over the next

few weeks, we will be considering and discussing the following:

What are the primary causes

and/or immediate effects of the current food waste crisis? What are some possible solutions to

this crisis?

Assignment Overview

The section below outlines the specific requirement of this assignment.

Purpose

The purpose of this assignment is to:

1. Read and respond to a college-level text.

2. Compose college-level writing.

3. Evaluate sources for credibility and appropriateness in respect to their audience and

purpose.

Complete the writing processsynthesizing information, brainstorming, outlining and

writing drafts.

5. Respond to a topic with an original argument.

Goals

This assignment will help students meet the following Student Learning Objectives, as stated on

the course syllabus:

Texts

Aubrey , Allison. Its Time To Get Serious About Reducing Food Waste, Feds Say.

National Public Radio Inc

, 16 Sept. 2015.

Oliver, John. Food Waste. Last Week Tonight. 19 Jul. 2015. Web.

Royte , Elizabeth. One-Third of Food Is Lost or Wasted: What Can Be Done.

National

Geographic

, 13 Oct. 2014.

Stuart, Tristan. The Global Food Waste Scandal. Ted Talk.

TEDSalon

, London. Sep

2012.Web.

Qi, Danyi, Brian E. Roe. Household Food Waste: Multivariate Regression and Principal

Components of Analyses of Awareness and Attitudes among U.S. Consumers.

PLoS

One

. 21 Jul. 2016.

Task

Compose an essay, between 100-1200 words in length, which presents an argument about the

causes and effects of food waste in the United States and presents possible solutions to the crisis.

More Specifically:

Identify a narrowed topic and develop an argument about that topic

Be well organized and demonstrate coherence. Your paper should include:

An introduction section that states your topic and thesis;

A discussion section which develops your argument with PIE paragraphs: clear

point, at least two examples from the articles and analysis

A conclusion section which wraps up the paper

1. Use active/critical-reading strategies to produce accurate, concise

summaries of college level/academic texts.

2. Synthesize researched material from multiple texts to create and support

an argument in response to a prompt. Draw direct evidence from texts in

support of claims and analyze how that evidence supports the claim.

3. Utilize the various phases in the writing processprewriting, writing

revision, and proofreadingto produce clear, articulate, well-supported,

well-organized essays.

4. Avoid plagiarism by properly citing quoted, summarized, and

paraphrased material using MLA format.