Energy and Resources Group, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA.
Department of Environmental Science, Policy, & Management (ESPM), University of California, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA.
J Environ Manage. 2020 Feb 15;256:109977. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2019.109977. Epub 2019 Dec 18.
Food waste measurement and policy often seek to differentiate between edible food and associated inedible parts, acknowledging different underlying causes for discard and different preferred solutions for waste management. Given the varying views of edibility within and across cultures, there is no widely agreed upon or universal categorization. To understand how edibility influences the outcome of food waste quantification, we applied four different categorizations to 489 household kitchen diaries from Denver, CO and New York City, NY. We also compared them to how respondents self-characterized edibility. We found that the percentage of total food discarded considered edible ranged from 52% to 71% and that the top ten lists of most discarded edible foods changed based on the categorization used. We found that edibility does matter when studying household food waste in terms of defining the extent of the problem, identifying hot spots for intervention, and tracking progress over time. Additionally, we found that respondents' perceptions of edibility varied and were not aligned with any of the four categorizations. Our findings suggest that how edibility is defined should be rigorously and transparently considered and that the varied perceptions of edibility may influence what and how interventions to reduce wasted food are designed, targeted, and evaluated.
食物浪费的测量和政策通常试图区分可食用食物和相关不可食用部分，承认丢弃的不同潜在原因和废物管理的不同首选解决方案。鉴于不同文化内部和之间对可食用性的不同看法，没有广泛认可或普遍的分类。为了了解可食用性如何影响食物浪费量化的结果，我们将四种不同的分类方法应用于来自科罗拉多州丹佛市和纽约市的 489 份家庭厨房日记。我们还将它们与受访者自我描述的可食用性进行了比较。我们发现，被认为可食用的已丢弃食物总量的百分比从 52%到 71%不等，并且根据使用的分类，最常丢弃的十种可食用食物的列表发生了变化。我们发现，在研究家庭食物浪费时，可食用性确实很重要，因为它可以定义问题的严重程度、确定干预的热点以及跟踪随时间的进展。此外，我们发现受访者对可食用性的看法存在差异，并且与四种分类都不相符。我们的研究结果表明，应该严格和透明地考虑如何定义可食用性，并且可食用性的不同看法可能会影响减少浪费食物的干预措施的设计、目标和评估方式。
