The Social and Psychological Reasons of Food Waste
Food waste, because of its inherent nature, consists of a union of culture, identity and our consumption habits, making tackling it a very hard endeavor. In their through and beautifully constructed paper Bloc et al. unfolds this problem by offering a series of explanations regarding the forementioned parts of our problem. In contrast, Chan unfurls a series of grass-roots movements that tries to tackle this problem head-on. The writer of this article does concur with both of them, thinking that grass-roots solutions and NGOs are important to make change. In the following paragraphs I shall try to show the links between our culture, consumption habits and food waste.
Our ability to evaluate whether food is edible or not is one of the core evolutionary traits that the marketers influence and in turn we internalize to create cultural biases that influence our choices. This selection mechanism depends on the so-called visual cues, that means visual traits that one product has, for example the redness and the shininess of an apple. These visual cues effect the people’s decision-making system, it has been showed that people are more willing to throw out food that has been distorted. But it does not stop just there, for example people from the more developed countries demand to find same products in four seasons of the year, creating a long supply line for the foods that are not available during season. These supply lines always result in food-waste because of the inherent issue with dealing with perishable goods. The marketers, being on the opposite end of this spectrum, both influence and respond to these visual cues and cultural preferences, creating an endless food waste situation.
Another phenomenon about wasting food is the emotions' effect. Emotions can affect our choices when it comes to eating. Stress eating or shunning food as a coping mechanism with emotions is not a strange thing for many people. This may lead to scenarios in which people consume fast foods or sugary treats, which have longer shelf life compared to any leftovers in their fridge, which will lead to food waste. The people’s personality also plays a part in their choices, materialistic people, in general, prefer bigger plates and bigger variants when it comes to food.
After explaining the consumer part of this problem, I would like to explain this problem on the other side of the food spectrum i.e., the restaurants. Restaurants, like marketers, have to reflect consumer demands, which prefer large menus and bigger plates over succinct menus and normal sized plates, after all everybody wants the bigger bang for their buck. The result of this phenomenon is larger menus, which require more ingredients to store, which in turn results in more food waste, for these ingredients are perishable.
In addition, I must explain the biases which affect us. I would like to explain the so-called planning fallacy, which leads to people underestimating the requirements for the food they are about to prepare, or in contrast overestimate. Underestimating may result in a joyless portion, which could be wasted, while overestimating may result in an unneeded surplus. Furthermore, there are also biases about the expiration date, which leads to people throwing food out because it is already gone bad, however generally speaking these dates or not set-in stone and the so called “best by” dates are nothing more than suggestions. Hence, it must be said that biases influence our buying and eating mechanisms generally in a negative direction which results in food waste. Restaurants suffer from these biases too. Over shopping for ingredients or under shopping creates problems for them be it not having enough ingredients to make a dish or having surplus ingredients which means a net loss for them.
Furthermore, solving this problem requires work both by the government and the NGOs. I would like to begin with the obvious need for government action. Creating calorie restrictions to plates would be a good start because it would reduce the size of these plates, which would mean less waste. The government should introduce fines for unnecessary wastes in restaurants. It is also important to implore the government to create education campaigns to illustrate how to fight against this epidemic. On the other hand, we have the NGOs, which can create applications for food-sharing. The experiment with these apps has been successful in Hong Kong (Chan, 2019) and I believe they can be successful anywhere else because of their easiness to use and their easy way of adapting to different cultures for all you need is few people to code them. They can also open soup kitchens using the foods that are about to perish, it would be very beneficent to open soup kitchens because they would both feed the needy and use their reach to teach people about food waste which would result in more people contributing their food and they could also advertise their applications in these events by flyers. The NGOs can also open factories where they turn wasted food into fertilizer, which would help them make money and use that money to illuminate the people. They can also open factories to turn the remains of food to drinking water, which would be very beneficial considering the climate change and incoming water shortages.
Therefore, to conclude, I want to remind you that the food waste problem is many ways linked with our culture and our biases which in turn affect our choices. In order to fight against this problem, we need to form institutions and suppress our wrong instincts and biases. These institutions would help this cause in many ways be it educating people or reforming food waste to something more useful. These institutions also could help people by creating networks in which people share their food which are about to be wasted. When it comes to our biases and our instincts, we must remember that we can overcome them by educating ourselves and learning how to do better. We live in unprecedent times regarding to both food and food waste, nowhere on history have we had more food, and more food waste. I sincerely believe and hope that one day we can be both hunger and waste free.
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Grammar and spelling errors:
Line 5, column 1003, Rule ID: WHITESPACE_RULE
Message: Possible typo: you repeated a whitespace
Suggestion:
...s which means a net loss for them. Furthermore, solving this problem requir...
^^^
Transition Words or Phrases used:
also, but, furthermore, hence, however, if, may, regarding, so, therefore, while, after all, for example, in addition, in contrast, in general, mind you, to begin with, on the other hand
Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments
Performance on Part of Speech:
To be verbs : 32.0 15.1003584229 212% => Less to be verbs wanted.
Auxiliary verbs: 35.0 9.8082437276 357% => Less auxiliary verb wanted.
Conjunction : 38.0 13.8261648746 275% => Less conjunction wanted
Relative clauses : 39.0 11.0286738351 354% => Less relative clauses wanted (maybe 'which' is over used).
Pronoun: 110.0 43.0788530466 255% => Less pronouns wanted
Preposition: 141.0 52.1666666667 270% => Less preposition wanted.
Nominalization: 18.0 8.0752688172 223% => Less nominalizations (nouns with a suffix like: tion ment ence ance) wanted.
Performance on vocabulary words:
No of characters: 5194.0 1977.66487455 263% => Less number of characters wanted.
No of words: 1030.0 407.700716846 253% => Less content wanted.
Chars per words: 5.0427184466 4.8611393121 104% => OK
Fourth root words length: 5.66512251163 4.48103885553 126% => OK
Word Length SD: 2.6397706536 2.67179642975 99% => OK
Unique words: 443.0 212.727598566 208% => Less unique words wanted.
Unique words percentage: 0.430097087379 0.524837075471 82% => More unique words wanted or less content wanted.
syllable_count: 1572.3 618.680645161 254% => syllable counts are too long.
avg_syllables_per_word: 1.5 1.51630824373 99% => OK
A sentence (or a clause, phrase) starts by:
Pronoun: 24.0 9.59856630824 250% => Less pronouns wanted as sentence beginning.
Article: 8.0 3.08781362007 259% => Less articles wanted as sentence beginning.
Subordination: 5.0 3.51792114695 142% => OK
Conjunction: 3.0 1.86738351254 161% => OK
Preposition: 13.0 4.94265232975 263% => Less preposition wanted as sentence beginnings.
Performance on sentences:
How many sentences: 43.0 20.6003584229 209% => Too many sentences.
Sentence length: 23.0 20.1344086022 114% => OK
Sentence length SD: 59.5613131743 48.9658058833 122% => OK
Chars per sentence: 120.790697674 100.406767564 120% => OK
Words per sentence: 23.9534883721 20.6045352989 116% => OK
Discourse Markers: 4.32558139535 5.45110844103 79% => OK
Paragraphs: 7.0 4.53405017921 154% => Less paragraphs wanted.
Language errors: 1.0 5.5376344086 18% => OK
Sentences with positive sentiment : 17.0 11.8709677419 143% => OK
Sentences with negative sentiment : 21.0 3.85842293907 544% => Less negative sentences wanted.
Sentences with neutral sentiment: 5.0 4.88709677419 102% => OK
What are sentences with positive/Negative/neutral sentiment?
Coherence and Cohesion:
Essay topic to essay body coherence: 0.157072590009 0.236089414692 67% => OK
Sentence topic coherence: 0.0492969685549 0.076458572812 64% => OK
Sentence topic coherence SD: 0.0511427807581 0.0737576698707 69% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence: 0.0958820503613 0.150856017488 64% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence SD: 0.0464029983617 0.0645574589148 72% => OK
Essay readability:
automated_readability_index: 14.3 11.7677419355 122% => OK
flesch_reading_ease: 56.59 58.1214874552 97% => OK
smog_index: 8.8 6.10430107527 144% => OK
flesch_kincaid_grade: 11.1 10.1575268817 109% => OK
coleman_liau_index: 12.25 10.9000537634 112% => OK
dale_chall_readability_score: 8.21 8.01818996416 102% => OK
difficult_words: 224.0 86.8835125448 258% => Less difficult words wanted.
linsear_write_formula: 8.0 10.002688172 80% => OK
gunning_fog: 11.2 10.0537634409 111% => OK
text_standard: 12.0 10.247311828 117% => OK
What are above readability scores?
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Rates: 70.0 out of 100
Scores by essay e-grader: 4.2 Out of 6.0
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Note: the e-grader does NOT examine the meaning of words and ideas. VIP users will receive further evaluations by advanced module of e-grader and human graders.