Section 1, Topic 5
Section 1 (At Home ways to Reduce your Environmental Impact) - Topic 5 (Food Waste)
The first thing I want to say before I start this article is: I'm sorry that it's been almost a month since my last post! My last couple of weeks were VERY busy, but don't worry: I haven't forgotten about the club. In fact, I've been thinking about it, trying to find a good time where I can write a news article. I'm going to be slightly more busy now, so my news posts will be less frequent than it used to be. If you want to write a news post, just tell me! I'll make you admin and you can write posts for the club. 
This next article is about food waste. So, what is food waste, and why is it bad for the environment?
I actually went a little into this in the first article that I'd written for Save our Beautiful Planet, and you can check it out here.
If you don't want to go into reading it, here's a quick summery about what I mentioned about food waste in the article: Food waste is bad for the environment when you throw your food in the trash, because when it goes into the landfill and degrades, it creates a greenhouse gas worse than Co2 called methane. Methane has a 72x more global warming potential than Co2! Crazy, right?
I didn't mention that food waste is still bad for the environment when you throw it into the compost. It's less harmful than throwing it into the trash, though.
But why is it harmful throwing it into the compost? The compost itself has nothing to do with the problem. In fact, it's the way that the food is produced.
Let's say you buy... ummm.... blueberries from the market. The blueberries went through a long journey. First, they had to be grown at a farm. Water is used to water the blueberries, meaning less water for aquatic habitats. When the blueberries are ripe, they are picked. They need to be transferred to the grocery store, which takes a truck, which will run on gas. (I'm writing this from 10/1/2021, so hopefully when you're reading this, there will be electric trucks on the road!) Then, when it gets to the grocery store, it might have to be refrigerated, meaning energy used on that. If you want to learn more about energy, check out this weekly discussion article here. But that's not all. You have to go to the store to pick up those blueberries. Maybe you're walking. Maybe you're riding your bike. Maybe you're taking a bus. However, it's difficult to carry around groceries wherever you go, so you'll probably be taking the car which - you guessed it! - uses up energy.
So when you waste those blueberries, you're also wasting a lot of energy. You might be thinking 'but the truck to carry blueberries carried other blueberries, which might not be wasted, and the car that I drove to the grocery store, I used to buy other groceries, which I didn't waste.' If you're thinking that, you do have a good point. However, it all adds up. People will throw away more blueberry tins, and that energy is wasted.
But it's not the energy. It's also the hard work that went into making the blueberries. That's why it's important not to waste food. However, it's even more terrible to waste meat. Meat takes more of an environmental footprint to make. (You can learn more from a previous article that I wrote here). Also, the meat is - though many will forget while their eating meat - an animal. An animal's life living in the back of the freezer than then being wasted when it gets to old.
But how do you help with this?
A helpful thing to do is have a basket in your fridge and freezer marked 'things going bad soon.' That way, then next time you open the fridge, you might find that your spinach and tomatoes are going bad soon. So make some pasta or some salad! Those simple measures will help you waste less food.
Another tip is to remember the difference between the 'eat by' 'best to eat buy' and 'sell buy' are completely different things. Check out an article at: https://news.extension.uconn.edu/2019/10/30/expiration-use-by-and-sell-by-dates-what-do-they-really-mean/# to learn more.
A 3rd one - wow, earthmelon has a LOT of tips today! - is to eat as much of the food you can. For example, if you have extra watermelon rinds, you can make smoothies with them. I know you're probably thinking: earthmelon, I know you like earths and melons from your usernames, but this is too much. Who makes smoothies out of watermelon rinds?! I know that watermelon rinds may be gross on it's own, but when you add fruits and toss it into the blender, you most likely won't taste the watermelon rinds. If you want to learn the health benefits of watermelon rinds, go to: https://www.healthline.com/health/food-nutrition/watermelon-rind-benefits#rich-in-fiber
I also want to bring up a problem. Many people waste food, but many people are suffering from food insecurity. How should we solve this problem? I don't have an answer myself, but we can chat about it in the comments below. ⬇️
Thank you for reading this article! Check out Save our Beautiful Planet's last article at: https://www.chess.com/news/view/section-1-topic-4 It's about a really cool search engine that uses it's ad revenue to plant trees.
Again, thanks for reading!
-@earthmelon12345
