Food Waste: Causes and Solutions Essay (Band 9)
Band-9 problem/solution essay on global food waste, with criteria breakdown and sustainability vocabulary.
A large amount of food is wasted globally. What are the causes and what solutions can you suggest?
A Band-9 model answer
One third of all food produced never nourishes anyone — a scandal of logistics and habit. Waste concentrates at opposite ends of wealth: poor infrastructure loses harvests, rich abundance discards them.
In developing regions, the causes are physical: inadequate cold chains, rough roads, and absent storage rot produce before markets. A tomato's journey on a broken truck in summer heat is a race against biology — and biology usually wins. In affluent societies, waste is behavioral and commercial: cosmetic standards reject edible produce, bulk promotions encourage overbuying, confusing date labels trash safe food, and oversized portions normalize excess. Abundance, paradoxically, devalues what scarcity protected.
Solutions follow the split. For infrastructure waste, invest in cold storage, all-weather rural roads, and processing facilities near farms — unglamorous spending with enormous returns, since saved harvests raise farmer incomes directly. For abundance waste, standardize date labels to distinguish safety from quality, penalize supermarket dumping while protecting donors from liability, and normalize smaller portions plus doggy-bag culture. Technology helps both: apps redistributing surplus food already rescue millions of meals.
Wasting food while millions hunger is civilization's ugliest arithmetic. The fixes are known, cheap relative to the loss, and profitable for farmers. What rots in fields and bins is not just calories but labor, water, and climate. Stop the rot — the moral and economic case align perfectly.
(256 words)
Examiner notes: why Band 9
Task Response (9): Wealth-split diagnosis (infrastructure loss vs abundance discard) with stage-matched solutions (cold chains vs label reform). Apps and liability-shield specifics show currency.
Coherence & Cohesion (9): "Opposite ends of wealth" architecture governs both halves; each solution traces to its named cause. Arithmetic motif closes the loop.
Lexical Resource (9): Food-systems precision: "cold chains," "cosmetic standards," "bliss of abundance" avoided — instead "devalues," "liability," "surplus redistribution." Exact, unsentimental.
Grammatical Range & Accuracy (9): Colon-led programs, em-dash qualifications, parallel closes. Clean control.
High-scoring phrases
- never nourishes anyone — waste as failure (precise verb)
- race against biology — spoilage image
- abundance devalues — paradox mechanism
- safety vs quality labels — distinction prescription
- ugliest arithmetic — moral math framing
- stop the rot — literal-metaphorical double close
Quick answers
Is food waste too narrow a topic?
No — a third of food wasted is a vast topic spanning farms, retail, and homes. Narrow topics allow deeper mechanisms, which score higher.
Consumers or industry: who wastes more?
Split by stage: developing nations lose food in storage and transport; rich nations waste it at retail and home. Stage-specific analysis impresses.
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