Can you help the Earth by eating your leftovers? Kids say yes

Have you ever thrown away your food?

Whether it’s a moldy piece of bread or an entire dinner’s worth of leftovers, every piece of food we buy and eat has a big impact on the environment.

CBC Kids News spoke to two Canadian kids who took on a unique challenge in March through the environmental organization Earth Rangers.

They teamed up with their families to try new things like freezing leftovers and composting vegetable scraps.

In the end, they met their goal to reduce their daily food waste and they learned something along the way!

Why 2 Canadians kids took on the challenge

Avalyn Smith, 11, from Edmonton, Alberta, and Asha Hagi, 9, from Ottawa, Ontario, are two Earth Rangers who participated in the challenge and tracked their progress online.

They’ve been Earth Rangers for more than three years and care deeply about the environment.

“I found the challenge quite fun and it got me thinking about what I eat,” said Avalyn in an interview with CBC Kids News.

In March, she started freezing leftover food instead of throwing it out and cooked new recipes to rescue the fruits and vegetables in her fridge that were going bad.

“It’s just nice to know that instead of throwing something away and it going into a landfill, you can turn it into something else,” said Avalyn.

Meanwhile, Asha got her brothers and parents involved in looking at the expiry dates of items in their fridge and cupboards, so they could eat the food that was about to go bad first.

She said that learning new habits from the challenge was easy and that other kids should take food waste seriously.

“Wasting food is bad for the environment because you’re wasting a ton of resources, which helps climate change keep going,” said Asha.

“All the greenhouse gases that go into [making something], all those people’s hard work, it just ends up in the trash.”

Challenge pays off

Avalyn and Asha were just two of the 9,000 kids who participated in the challenge.

In total, Earth Rangers said more than 19,000 plates of food were prevented from going to waste.

They also stopped scraps of food from going to a landfill by composting 12,000 times.

Why does this matter?

More than half of the food made in Canada gets wasted every year.

That’s according to a Canadian food waste charity called Second Harvest.

How kids can help

While the Earth Rangers challenge may be over, there are lots of ways to practise food-saving measures at home.

Kids can try freezing their leftovers for later or using scraps of vegetables and leftover chicken bones to create their own soup stocks.

Composting items like eggshells and coffee grinds instead of throwing them in the trash is also an option.

Many municipalities in Canada have composting pick-up, just like recycling, so you don’t have to do it yourself.

Jagger Gordon, a chef from Toronto, Ontario, has a lot of experience with reducing food waste.

He created an app called Feed It Forward that helps connect people who have food to give away with volunteers who distribute it to people in need.

Gordon said the first step to reducing food waste is to get creative in the kitchen.

“See what’s being thrown in the garbage and think of creative ways that you could use it in a soup, stew, chili or a beverage,” said Gordon.

“Just because a piece of fruit or vegetable is imperfect doesn’t mean it’s useless. Just cut off the bad bits and chop it up.”

Gordon encourages kids to challenge their parents and ask them, “What are we doing with our food?”

Source:

Can you help the Earth by eating your leftovers? Kids say yes. (n.d.). CBC Kids News. https://www.cbc.ca/kidsnews/post/can-you-help-the-earth-by-eating-your-leftovers-kids-and-pro-chef-say-yes