Essay 2: The 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 don’t 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.
4. Complete the writing process—synthesizing 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:
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 process—prewriting, writing
revision, and proofreading—to produce clear, articulate, well-supported,
well-organized essays.
4. Avoid plagiarism by properly citing quoted, summarized, and paraphrased
material using MLA format.
Texts
•
Aubrey , Allison. “It's 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:
o
An introduction section that states your topic and thesis;
o
A discussion section which develops your argument with PIE paragraphs: clear
point, at least two examples from the articles and analysis
o
A conclusion section which wraps up the paper
o NOTE: Since you are citing the articles and videos, and possibly your
own sources, don’t forget your Works Cited page.
Requirements:
1. Rough Draft for Peer Review (30 points)
2. Final Draft (100 points)
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