Food Audit Write-Up
For the final project you will be polishing and finalizing the food audit you completed into a scientific paper. This means following the proper format of a scientific paper utilizing the following sections: Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion & Conclusion. This document will help you organize your paper by sections.
When you write a scientific paper, just like any paper it is important for you to think about the organization and flow. If the flow doesn’t work the reader won’t be able to follow your train of thought.
Introduction/Background: This section will introduce the reader to the topic. You must explain what the topic is, why it is important, and the key background information for understanding the scope of the project and/or why the project is important. Then, you must clearly explain what the project is, why you are doing that specific project, what your hypothesis is, and––finally––a justification for your hypothesis.
In this section, be sure to address:
Hook - gravity of the problem including global, national and local data
What is FLW?
Why is FL&W a problem?–environmental, economical, health and social impacts
Food supply chain and FL&W–zooming into the consumption stage
Why are we doing this home food audit? Does it solve/reduce the amount of FW at the consumer’s level?
Hypothesis
Justification for Hypothesis
Brief potential solutions–behavioral or mechanical/biological
Materials & Methods
Your Methods section is more than just a step by step procedure; rather, it should be a combination of steps and written explanations that discusses what materials you need, as well as the steps that someone needs to take in order to follow the procedure exactly as you did it. Likewise, a good Materials section also includes some rationale for why certain data collection methods were used/why they are relevant. This might mean having subsections such as Materials, Categories of Food Waste, and Procedure, to name a few examples.
Data
Your data section should only include the polished data and ideally consist of (at least) one table that summarizes your raw data and (at least) one chart or graph that helps you draw a broader conclusion about your data. There should be a written portion describing the reliability and variability data, as well as explaining any parameters that you calculated (e.g., averages, differences, etc.).
Discussion and Conclusion.
The final section of your report should consist of a discussion of your results and the broader conclusions that your audience should take away from your report. What did you learn from conducting this audit? What can be done with this information?