Read the text, and then choose the correct answers.

Food for Thought

How often do you look in your fridge? And what’s in it? Look at what you eat in a day and multiply that by the millions of people all over the world. All those people, all that food. Where does it come from? Should we care?

Today, in my fridge, there are a lew grapes, a bunch of bananas and some fruit juice - things that aic not expensive and that are good for me. There is also a pizza, and some burgers in the freezer — which aie not so good. I know what this food does to my body, but what does it do to the woild aiound me? It’s time to look at my carbon footprint and sort out the good from the bad and the really ugly.

        Food miles

My first stop is the label. Labels give US lots of information: how long we can keep our food, how many calories it has, and where it comes from. A few hundred years ago, most of our food came from places we could walk to, but today, food travels thousands of miles. We refrigerate it, then transport it in planes and ships all over the world. This creates pollution and causes of global warming 1 look at the slices of pizza and immediately feel guilty - not because it’s unhealthy, but because the prawns on it are from Thailand. I know we produce prawns in the UK, but they’re more expensive. I take out a banana - it’s from Brazil, but that’s not too bad. It came here by boat, so the carbon footprint of this healthy snack is small.

        Packaging

The next stop is the packaging. In the UK, we don’t recycle all our packaging; we throw away more than 30% of it. This waste goes to the rubbish dump and not to the recycling centre.

Luckily, we don’t need to package food like bananas, but food like grapes needs protection. I look at the grapes in my fridge - they’re in a plastic container and they’re from Spain.

        Production

So my grapes are from Spain, but at least they grew in natural sunlight. In the UK, people grow grapes in heated greenhouses, which means British grapes are less energy-efficient. But there is one other thing in my freezer, and if pizza and grapes are ‘bad’, then this food is ‘really ugly’. It’s the burgers. They have the biggest carbon footprint because they come from cows. In the USA, cows create the same amount of greenhouse gases as 20 million cars. As I close the fridge door, I make a checklist for my next trip to the supermarket: 1. Read the label. 2. Look at the packaging. 3. Don’t buy a lot of meat. Maybe I could grow my own vegetables, too. It’s eco-friendly. I’d save some money and I wouldn’t feel guilty about eating burgers.

21. What does the writer want to find out about the food in his fridge?

        A. if it is good for his health         

        B. if it is good for the environment

        C. if it saves his money

22. What can we learn from food labels?

        A. Information about the people who make our food

        B. How far the food has travelled

        C. Why the price is low or high

23. Why does the writer feel guilty about the pizza?

        A. Because it is made in Thailand.

        B. Because it has a big carbon footprint.

        C. Because it is bad for his health.

24. Why are bananas better than grapes?

        A. Because they don’t have any packaging.

        B. Because they don’t travel very far.

        C. Because they grow in natural sunlight.

25. Why are burgers really ugly?

        A. Because they are unhealthy.

        B. Because they come from the USA.

        C. Because they come from cows.

26. What does the writer want to do?

        A. He wants to stop eating meat.

        B. He wants to reduce his carbon footprint.

        C. He wants to have a healthy lifestyle.