Two students, Anna and Ben, discussing their research project on food

Section 3. You will hear two students, Anna and Ben, discussing their research project on food waste with their tutor. First, you have some time to look at questions 21 to 24. Now listen carefully and answer questions 21 to 24. TUTOR: Anna, Ben, your food-waste project. Let's dig into the results properly. What surprised you most? ANNA: Honestly, where the waste actually happens. Before we started, we'd both assumed the supermarkets were the villains, throwing tonnes away in their storerooms. And we did expect a fair bit to be lost in transport, lorries breaking down, that sort of thing. But it turns out very little is lost on the way to the shops, and surprisingly little in the shops themselves. By a huge margin, the most is thrown out right at the end of the chain, in people's own homes. BEN: That completely turned the project on its head. TUTOR: A striking result. And how did you gather your evidence? Before you hear the rest of the discussion, you have some time to look at questions 25 to 30. BEN: We handed paper questionnaires to shoppers as they left three different stores. We'd also hoped to get the supermarkets' own internal waste figures, to compare, but that was a dead end, we wrote to head office after head office and heard absolutely nothing back. Finding the store locations and opening times was easy enough, that was never the problem; it was their waste data they simply would not share. TUTOR: Frustrating, but the questionnaires clearly worked. Did you break the waste down by type of food? ANNA: We did, and that was the most revealing part. Bread came out worst by far, people buy a loaf, use a couple of slices, and the rest goes stale before anyone finishes it. Fresh vegetables were the next biggest, but for a completely different reason, people simply cook far more than they need and scrape the surplus straight into the bin. Milk and other dairy were different again, they tended to be thrown out because they had passed their date before anyone got round to using them. And tinned goods, interestingly, were barely wasted at all, people just leave them in the cupboard for years. TUTOR: Four quite different stories there. And your recommendations? BEN: Two main ones. Top of the list, we think clearer date labels would help most of all, shopper after shopper told us that 'best before' and 'use by' genuinely confused them, and confused people bin things just to be safe. We did toy with asking shops to slash the price of older stock, but we dropped that, it only shifts the problem. ANNA: And our second recommendation is that unsold food should go to charities rather than into the bin. We looked hard at simply reducing the packaging, everyone loves that idea, but honestly we weren't convinced it would change how much food is actually wasted; it's really a separate problem. TUTOR: A solid, well-argued basis for your report. Well done, both of you. That is the end of Section 3. You now have some time to check your answers.