OSU Plate Waste Study

Study Summary

Globally, about one-third of edible food is lost or wasted 1. Wasted food depletes resources used to produce the food (as a matter of definition, "produce" includes all activities to distribute, package and prepare food for human consumption at any venue, but does not include growing, transporting and processing), deprives hungry people from needed nutrition and represents the most common (\>20%) and most environmentally deleterious component (in terms of greenhouse gas) of US landfills3-6. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) identified reducing FW as a key to increasing global food security (OECD 2011) 7. The Obama Administration recently announced a first ever FW reduction goal for the United States of 50% by 2030. USDA and EPA will pursue this goal via partnerships with the private sector, charitable and faith-based organizations, as well as state, local and tribal governments. In developed economies, consumers are the largest source of FW via home preparation and dining out2, 8. In order to achieve FW goals, we must anticipate how consumer FW generation and handling decisions will respond to proposed policies and interventions. However, there exist substantial barriers to measuring consumer FW: existing methods have high respondent burden and yield biased measurements of FW generation9-11. In this project we will test a smartphone application (app) for measuring household FW.

Primary Outcome

Food waste was assessed using the Remote Food Photography Method (RFPM) over approximately 1 week. The outcome is the percent of food items across all participants that were not fully consumed during this time and that were not saved for later consumption as a leftover. No measure of dispersion or precision is possible since the value simply reflects a percent of all items across all participants.

Interventions

• DEVICE Food Photography Application©