Food-Waste Restaurants

Intro

Sometimes, we buy food and forget to eat it. A banana, for example, will turn black and gross in about a week. Then, we must throw it away. We waste a lot of good food doing this, and so do restaurants and stores. But what if there were a way to still use food after its sell-by date?

Now, there’s a new idea for recycling food. A food-waste restaurant makes old food into something tasty. This special restaurant gets expired food from other places and quickly cooks it before it can rot. These restaurants want to turn food waste into gourmet meals. This idea won’t feed every starving person in the world, but it might be a good first step.

Can Andy get Kelsey to try a food-waste restaurant? Listen to this English lesson to find out!

Dialogue

Andy_H: Kelsey, I can’t tell you how excited I am to finally hear that there are food-waste restaurants.
Kelsey: Food waste? What does that mean?
Andy_H: Food that goes wasted, you know, like, you have a lot of lettuce, and then you don’t sell it all. Well, they’re finally recycling that lettuce. Putting it into grocery stores, into food shelters. They’re finally using all this food that otherwise would just expire and rot.
Kelsey: Wait, so does that mean they’re taking, like, expired food, and then we’re eating it at a restaurant? That sounds kind of gross.
Andy_H: Well, it’s not expired food. It’s food that’s about to be expired. So, instead of just letting the stuff rot and then throw it away, they repackage the food. They make sure that it’s used in another way. There are restaurants that, as soon as its sell-by date passes, throw it into other dishes before it actually becomes wasteful food. I can’t begin to tell you how good this is on a level of consumerism. We waste so much food! Billions of pounds of food go wasted all over the globe, and we have how many problems with starving people?
Kelsey: So, it’s perfectly safe and healthy?
Andy_H: You betcha.
Kelsey: Well then, it sounds like a good idea. I guess I’ll give it a try.
Andy_H: Not only safe, it’s gourmet.

Discussion

Kelsey doesn’t know what food-waste restaurants are, and she doesn’t understand why they make Andy so happy. Andy can explain. A food-waste restaurant gets food that is almost expired or at its sell-by date. The restaurant will then quickly cook and sell the food. Andy likes the idea of using old food because most people just throw it away.

To Kelsey, recycling old food is a little gross. She doesn’t want to eat something that’s about to rot! But once Andy explains that the food is totally safe and tasty, Kelsey agrees to try a food-waste restaurant. After all, she shouldn’t waste food when other people are starving. And who knows, maybe food waste can actually become a gourmet meal.

Do you waste a lot of food at home? In your country, what do stores do when food is expired?

Grammar Point

Passive Voice

Andy is telling Kelsey about food-waste restaurants. Talking about old food, he says, “They make sure that it’s used in another way.” Andy uses the passive voice.

Sometimes you say things like, “My bike was stolen,” or, “The boy was given a gift.” But who stole my bike? Who gave the boy a gift? You aren’t sure. That’s why you use the passive voice, which emphasizes the person or thing an action was done to, not the one who did the action.

Passive voice is normally formed with to be + a past participle, as in, “Chris was hired yesterday.” You can use the passive voice in any tense by changing the form of ‘to be.’ For instance, you can say, “My cookie was eaten” (past tense) or, “My cookie is being eaten” (present progressive tense).

Andy uses the passive voice in a contracted form, shortening it is used to it’s used. “They make sure that it’s used in another way.” When speaking, it’s common to contract the passive form in the present tense, like Andy did.

When you want to include the one who performed the action in a passive voice sentence, you use the word ‘by’ after the verb. For instance, “Danny will be picked up by his mother today.”

Which sentence is in the passive voice, “The cat was sleeping last night,” or, “The cat was adopted last night”?