高校の部 優勝
安田　穣（兵庫県立長田高等学校）

51 Kilograms

 51 kilograms. Can you guess what this number shows? No, it's not how much my mother weighs. It is the average amount of food a single Japanese person wastes per year. As a country, Japan wastes more than 6,460,000 tons of food, which is enough to fill 15 Tokyo Domes every year. This is outrageous, especially because Japan does not grow enough food to feed its people, and relies heavily on imported food.
 This made me wonder, "Why and how does Japan end up wasting so much food?" I found out that much of the blame goes to the sales and inventory management system employed by convenience stores and supermarkets. These stores try to avoid two things in order to improve their businesses. One is to be out of stock, because it means losing business opportunities. So, they overstock food to prevent that from happening. The other is getting complaints from customers, be it about sellouts or the freshness of food. This is why they try to keep their shelves full at all times, and set their sales deadlines much earlier than necessary to insure freshness. The result is … tons of perfectly good food piling up in garbage bags.
 So, what can stores do to reduce food waste? I know one example of a successful case...my school cafeteria. They collect and keep data of what students have ordered in the past, and use it to decide the menu and predict sales based on the weather, temperature, and the school events being held. It's amazing how accurately they predict how much of what will sell. The cafeteria manages to satisfy us students with the food of our choices, and yet they almost never have any leftovers. Stores should make more efforts to control their stock so that they are neither out of stock nor overstocked. Another solution would be to adopt a system called dynamic pricing, where the prices are changed depending on the expiration date. This means a carton of milk that expires in 3 days is cheaper than the ones that do not expire for another week, encouraging customers to choose food that will expire first. If, despite these efforts stores still end up with unsold but edible food, they can always donate it to community cafeterias or homeless shelters.
 Now, let us not forget that we as individual consumers are also responsible for creating food waste. In fact, half of that 6,460,000 tons comes from our own kitchens. Imagine yourself opening the refrigerator in your home. What do you see inside? In the back of your fridge, I'm pretty sure that you will find some leftover or expired food you can't even remember the last time you saw it. You will probably have to throw it away, unless you want to eat it and get sick. Well, you've just contributed to the 51 kilograms. We have to stop this. We need to constantly remind ourselves not to buy more than we need, and to find ways to use up all the food we buy before it gets too old. We should also choose and buy food from stores that take measures against food waste. By doing so, we can pressure the stores to take actions to completely eliminate food waste.
 Japan should not forget its beautiful culture of having respect for food. Before and after each meal, we express our gratitude by saying "Itadakimasu" and "Gochisousama." Food is a precious gift that cannot be wasted, especially when there are still thousands and thousands of people suffering from hunger. I know that with each one of us being aware of this problem and doing something about it, food waste will no longer be an issue in the future.