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.