On Friday, 30 September, Gus Ranieri from Taste Before You Waste, a foundation with the mission to reduce consumer food waste, spoke to our Grade 9 and 10 French class about food waste and its impact on the planet. 

By raising awareness, Taste Before You Waste aims to provide citizens with inspiration and the opportunity for responsible and waste-free consumption, contributing to a social movement that pushes for a sustainable food system and, ultimately, an environmentally just society. Some ways that they strive for this vision is through hosting donation-based events such as foodcycle markets, wasteless Wednesday dinners, educational workshops, event catering and presentations, ultimately showcasing that food that we may currently regard as waste is actually delicious and valuable. 

Demonstrating the IB Learner Profile attribute of inquiry, students will use their learning from the talk to create projects in French which focus on the issue of food waste, allowing them to nurture their curiosity and further develop their independent and collaborative research skills.

Grade 10 student Olivia said: “for my French class, we are looking for solutions to the global waste problem that exists in typical western society. We are looking at different systems where we waste and to the extent of it. For example, materials, infrastructure, and cosmetics are large contributors to environmental concerns that we rarely even consider. Food waste interested me, as we don’t realise how much we waste. People think we don’t have enough food, but we do. It’s just in the wrong places. The labour and transportation costs, and movement of food, are the ideas that we are inquiring upon. In our French class, we are trying to create ideas that would help to improve this issue and that are more sustainable. We are looking at factors that could make less waste and create more ways to enable people to donate food to food banks. We will be doing the research and then presenting it to the class. We will have an interactive discussion around our ideas and findings. This will be all in French, of course.”