What the lunch bin contained

Text: an original contemporary feature-report-style practice extract.

The school’s lunch audit began with a question nobody wanted to answer beside a full bin: how much of what we served had actually been eaten? For one week, pupils scraped leftovers into separate containers. Bread went into one, vegetables into another. The containers were weighed after lunch, when the dining room had exchanged its roar for the scrape of stacked chairs.

The first chart made waste look satisfyingly tidy. Blue bars stood beside green bars, each with a number on top. Then the pupils wrote explanations. A sandwich had too much filling to hold together. A child had ten minutes to eat because a queue moved slowly. One portion was simply larger than someone wanted. The chart could show a weight; it could not show a hurried mouthful or the embarrassment of asking for less.

The kitchen tested smaller starting portions with seconds available. Staff changed the queue arrangement too. At the next weighing, the total fell, but the pupils refused to call the graph the whole result. They added a column for comments. The most useful sentence on the noticeboard was not a figure: “I had enough time to finish.”

Analyse how the writer uses language and structure to interest and engage the reader.

In your answer, consider:

• language features and techniques
• structural techniques
• the effect on the reader.

Support your views with detailed reference to the extract.