How small behavior changes can make a big impact on food waste
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Chris Wharton has spent the last 18 years researching diet and sustainability-related behavior changes. To some, the topics may seem unrelated, but to Wharton, a professor at Arizona State University's College of Health Solutions, they go hand in hand.
How? Food waste.
Every time we throw out food, we add to a growing pile of wasted money and resources. In fact, a family of four can discard $3,000 worth of food per year. But what if we could save money and the planet one banana at a time? According to Wharton, simple behavior changes are the key to healthier bodies and finances, all while benefiting the environment.
“When I came across the topic of food waste and started reading about it, it's just one of those places where you can have a big impact as an individual, without a lot of difficult behavior change,” Wharton said.
Change in the home can start with the ASU Waste Watchers initiative. It provides tips, from recipes to food storage strategies, on how to learn new behavior modifications around food. In fact, Wharton’s 2021 study showed a 27% decrease in food waste after participants received virtual education from the Waste Watchers website.
“If you learn some things, you can make big changes. It's one of those places where it's literally low-hanging fruit; an easy place to have a health win, a financial win and an environmental win all at the same time,” Wharton said.
In recognition of Sustainability Day on Oct. 29, ASU News asked Wharton to share more about how you can reduce your food waste and make an environmental impact.
Note: This interview has been lightly edited for length and/or clarity.
Question: We hear a lot about recycling and energy efficiency. Why not food waste?
Answer: From the public's perspective, (food waste is) a newer topic. While we've thought a lot about materials we're throwing out, saving energy and saving materials, the notion of saving food or reducing how much food is being thrown out is a topic that's only just recently been bleeding into the public consciousness.
Food has actually gone from pretty expensive back in the early 1900s to really pretty cheap today. We spend roughly 10% of our take-home income on food. It used to be closer to 50%. (Food) being a somewhat cheaper commodity, we may pay less attention to the value in it, and it may become easier, actually, to waste.
Q: Why is reducing food waste important?
A: The why is really important because there are multiple impacts. One is financial, one is environmental and one less talked about is health. The average family of four can throw out upwards of $3,000 a year worth of food waste. That's a huge amount of money, right? And of course, it'll be variable across different families and sizes, but you're talking about hundreds or thousands of dollars of lost value. We don't think about it when it's a single slice of moldy bread or a cup of old milk, but it adds up over the year.
From the environmental perspective, probably one of the most important sources of anthropogenic methane emissions — methane being a key climate change gas — is actually food waste. Food rotting in the landfills, the methane that is produced from that, were you to conceive of that as a country, it would be the third largest emitter in the world.
When you think about food, especially in Arizona, food is a huge vehicle for fresh water, as well as other limited resources. Mineable phosphate rock, for example, is something that we have to mine to add as an amendment in fertilizers on fields to grow food industrially. When we throw food out, we lose those limited resources, and that's stuff that's going to be hard to come by in the future.
The largest proportion of food waste, in homes in the U.S. anyway, is among perishable foods, specifically fruits and vegetables. We also know that 80–90% of Americans are failing to consume adequate servings of fruits and vegetables on a daily basis. We're literally throwing out opportunities to eat more healthfully.
Q: What advice do you have for those looking to reduce food waste?
A: There are lots of easy tips and tricks you can employ and significantly reduce your food waste. Some of the key categories where waste most often happens come in the form of misunderstanding date labeling or “expiration dates” on products.
There's almost no such thing as an actual expiration date in the U.S., except for baby formula. All other date labels are best by, use by and so forth, and that's really about the manufacturer's suggestion — often to the retailer — about when this thing will have peak quality. But you could open up a can months after the “expiration date” and it'll still be good to eat. So using our senses to determine when something may not be good anymore is the best way to go.
Another one is thinking about fruits and vegetables. Bananas going brown, for example, don't mean that it's time to throw them out. Maybe it’s time to freeze them so that you can use them in a recipe later, which can still deliver that great potassium that's in a banana. Or (take) wilted lettuce or greens — that just means they're dehydrated, it doesn't mean they've actually gone bad yet. You could freeze those as well.
There are lots of resources online. ASU Waste Watchers, our website, has infographics, podcasts, text-based materials and downloadables that give people all sorts of tips and tricks on how to reduce food waste.
Q: How do you hope to impact people's quality of life and well-being through your research?
A: I hope that the things I do, people can say, “I can do that thing right now, and my life is materially better because of it.” The research that we run, the resources we've created, when people make these changes in their homes, they have reported back to us, “Yes, we reduced our food waste; we're also eating healthier.” That's something that's come out of our work that we didn't expect, because we don't design our interventions to help people eat more healthfully. They just report that they do.
Learning about food waste, reducing it in the home can have an impact, certainly financially. You'll be able to save money. You will have a positive environmental impact. And you have a great opportunity to have a healthier diet as a result, and so those are the ways I'd love for people to learn and adapt and do.
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