The Eat First Shelf: Reading a Food Waste Graph

The Mensah Family's Food Waste Challenge

1Every week, many families scrape uneaten food into the trash. A forgotten bag of spinach turns slimy. Half a pot of rice dries out in the back of the refrigerator. When food is thrown away, the money, water and work it took to grow it are wasted too.

2The Mensah family decided to find out how much food they were wasting. For six weeks, they put every bit of food they threw away into one bucket. Every Sunday night, Kofi, who is ten, weighed the food scraps on a scale and wrote down the number of pounds. Then his sister Ama made a bar graph of the results.

3For the first two weeks, the family did not change anything. They only measured. Then, at the start of the third week, they tried three new ideas.

4First, before every trip to the grocery store, Dad checked the refrigerator and the pantry and wrote a shopping list. That way, the family stopped buying food they already had. Second, Mom cleared off one refrigerator shelf and labeled it "Eat First." Any food that would spoil soon went on that shelf. Third, the family made Friday "leftover night." Instead of cooking something new, they heated up and finished the week's leftovers.

5Not every week went perfectly. During the fifth week, Kofi's grandmother celebrated her birthday, and the family cooked far more food than the guests could eat, so some of it spoiled.

6Even so, Kofi and Ama were proud when they looked at their graph. "The bars tell the story," Ama said. "Our small changes added up." Now the family plans to keep their Eat First shelf for good.