Don’t Waste Your Food

Don’t Waste Your Food is one of six books in Crabtree’s “Good to Be Green” series that encourages children to embrace environmentally friendly habits. The copyright pages in all the books contain a number of suggested “Before, During and After Prompts” while the penultimate page, “A note about sharing this book”, is directed at any adults who are reading the book with (a) child(ren).This section explains the book’s purpose and suggests ways that adults can use the book with children. The “Good to Be Green” books have all been illustrated by Diane Ewen whose cartoon style artwork presents readers with multiracial characters.

In Don’t Waste Your Food, the focus is on reducing food waste. Readers first encounter Amara, who is in a wheelchair, at the supper table. As Amara pushes her unfinished meal plate away from her, her father says, “Try not to waste your food.” He removes her plate, and “[h]e put some of Amara’s leftovers in the fridge and scraped the rest into the food compost container.” At breakfast the next morning, Amara discovers that her delicious omelette includes some of last night’s leftovers. When Amara asks what happened to the rest of her dinner, her father takes her outside and shows her the family’s composter and explains its use and what can/cannot be placed in it. In response to Amara’s question, “What happens to the food people throw away?”, her father replies, “Food is buried in garbage dumps called landfill sites.” The pair then decide to preplan their meals “so we don’t buy too much food’, and, with that shopping list in hand, they walk to a local market to make their purchases. In a number of instances, the author, via text printed on a blue background, adds some factual information related to a event in the story. For instance, next to the aforementioned conversation about the fate of food that has been thrown in the garbage, Chancellor’s blue background text informs readers:

When we throw food away, we also waste the energy, water and packaging that was used to transport it to stores. Food in landfill sites rots and lets off methane, a gas that adds to global warming.

Following Don’t Waste Your Food’s main text, Chancellor provides a five-question true/false test plus a “Get Active” page that offers four suggestions to the book’s readers regarding the reduction of food waste. They include putting together a family grocery shopping list, creating a poster about composting, and going to a supermarket and finding “special offers” and then considering how such purchases could add to food waste. Finally, while at the store, the child can “find some fruit or vegetables that were grown in a different country.” After determining how far that food item had to travel in order to be in the store’s shelves, the child is encouraged to: “Write a story or a poem about the journey that the food took.” The book’s final page is shared by a glossary and an index, with the former consisting of words that had been bolded in the text.

One limitation of Don’t Waste Your Food is that it refers only to food waste in the home. Given the number of children who bring lunches to school (and often discard the flood items they don’t like), perhaps something could have been said about children participating in their own lunch preparation. Nonetheless, Don’t Waste Your Food contains some good, practical advice on how to diminish the amount of food that is wasted.