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 13.1623246493 243% => Less to be verbs wanted.
Auxiliary verbs: 35.0 7.85571142285 446% => Less auxiliary verb wanted.
Conjunction : 38.0 10.4138276553 365% => Less conjunction wanted
Relative clauses : 39.0 7.30460921844 534% => Less relative clauses wanted (maybe 'which' is over used).
Pronoun: 110.0 24.0651302605 457% => Less pronouns wanted
Preposition: 141.0 41.998997996 336% => Less preposition wanted.
Nominalization: 18.0 8.3376753507 216% => Less nominalizations (nouns with a suffix like: tion ment ence ance) wanted.
Performance on vocabulary words:
No of characters: 5194.0 1615.20841683 322% => Less number of characters wanted.
No of words: 1030.0 315.596192385 326% => Less content wanted.
Chars per words: 5.0427184466 5.12529762239 98% => OK
Fourth root words length: 5.66512251163 4.20363070211 135% => OK
Word Length SD: 2.6397706536 2.80592935109 94% => OK
Unique words: 443.0 176.041082164 252% => Less unique words wanted.
Unique words percentage: 0.430097087379 0.561755894193 77% => More unique words wanted or less content wanted.
syllable_count: 1572.3 506.74238477 310% => syllable counts are too long.
avg_syllables_per_word: 1.5 1.60771543086 93% => OK
A sentence (or a clause, phrase) starts by:
Pronoun: 24.0 5.43587174349 442% => Less pronouns wanted as sentence beginning.
Article: 8.0 2.52805611222 316% => Less articles wanted as sentence beginning.
Subordination: 5.0 2.10420841683 238% => Less adverbial clause wanted.
Conjunction: 3.0 0.809619238477 371% => Less conjunction wanted as sentence beginning.
Preposition: 13.0 4.76152304609 273% => Less preposition wanted as sentence beginnings.
Performance on sentences:
How many sentences: 43.0 16.0721442886 268% => Too many sentences.
Sentence length: 23.0 20.2975951904 113% => OK
Sentence length SD: 59.5613131743 49.4020404114 121% => OK
Chars per sentence: 120.790697674 106.682146367 113% => OK
Words per sentence: 23.9534883721 20.7667163134 115% => OK
Discourse Markers: 4.32558139535 7.06120827912 61% => OK
Paragraphs: 7.0 4.38176352705 160% => Less paragraphs wanted.
Language errors: 1.0 5.01903807615 20% => OK
Sentences with positive sentiment : 17.0 8.67935871743 196% => OK
Sentences with negative sentiment : 21.0 3.9879759519 527% => Less negative sentences wanted.
Sentences with neutral sentiment: 5.0 3.4128256513 147% => OK
What are sentences with positive/Negative/neutral sentiment?
Coherence and Cohesion:
Essay topic to essay body coherence: 0.157072590009 0.244688304435 64% => OK
Sentence topic coherence: 0.0492969685549 0.084324248473 58% => OK
Sentence topic coherence SD: 0.0511427807581 0.0667982634062 77% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence: 0.0958820503613 0.151304729494 63% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence SD: 0.0464029983617 0.056905535591 82% => OK
Essay readability:
automated_readability_index: 14.3 13.0946893788 109% => OK
flesch_reading_ease: 56.59 50.2224549098 113% => OK
smog_index: 8.8 7.44779559118 118% => OK
flesch_kincaid_grade: 11.1 11.3001002004 98% => OK
coleman_liau_index: 12.25 12.4159519038 99% => OK
dale_chall_readability_score: 8.21 8.58950901804 96% => OK
difficult_words: 224.0 78.4519038076 286% => Less difficult words wanted.
linsear_write_formula: 8.0 9.78957915832 82% => OK
gunning_fog: 11.2 10.1190380762 111% => OK
text_standard: 12.0 10.7795591182 111% => OK
What are above readability scores?
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Maximum five paragraphs wanted.
Rates: 67.4157303371 out of 100
Scores by essay e-grader: 6.0 Out of 9
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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.