dr. ronald e. mcnair acknowledgements - University of St. Thomas

ABSTRACT
Food waste in the United States is contributing to serious environmental, economic, and
social distress. Individual consumers have the potential to combat food waste through a
variety of simple mitigation practices. An important unanswered question is what would
motivate Americans to waste less food. The current research adapted methods used by
Nolan et al. to explore stated motivations for conserving energy. As in the Nolan et al.
study, we presented 239 participants with either an information-only message or one of
four messages describing a reason to reduce food waste: environmental, financial self
interest, social responsibility, and descriptive social norm. In addition, we tested whether
the addition of a striking image of food waste made the message more motivating.
Different from the case of energy conservation, our participants reported that the financial
self-interest message was most motivating. However, the result of this study demonstrated
that participants expressed similar motivations to reduce food waste as they did to conserve
energy. Future research will examine whether a further pattern found in energy
conservation also holds true for reducing food waste: that though people do not express
explicit motivation from a social norm message, it has the highest influence on actual
behavior.
America is a nation that throws away almost half of its food (Stuart, 2009).
This enormous amount of food waste endangers the environment, the economy,
and society. One of the most severe environmental problems with food waste
is the fact that food waste in landfills is one of the leading sources of methane,
a harmful greenhouse gas contributing to global warming. From an economic
standpoint, many Americans cannot financially afford to waste money during
a recession, yet spend money on food that ultimately gets thrown into the
garbage. Finally, food waste is a social problem: How is it that in a country
concerned with nationwide obesity, millions go without being able to eat each
day? The United States’ food waste habits are contradictory to its goals of
protecting the environment, gaining financial stability, and being a responsible
society.
BLOOM’S THREE: WHY FOOD WASTE MATTERS
Food waste is pervasive in America, and occurs at all stages of American
food production and consumption. In his book American Wasteland, Jonathan
Bloom (2010) explains how food is wasted throughout the agricultural process,
beginning at the farm and ending with consumers. First, harvesters must pick
through their crops and select only the best produce to sell to markets. The
remaining crops are often hauled off to landfills where the potentially edible
food is dumped and left to rot. The long travel period of most produce leads
to more food waste. By the time the produce reaches the market, grocers must
perform another pick through and discard produce that does not meet their
premium standards. Finally, consumers purchase fruits and vegetables, use a
portion of what is purchased, and throw away what goes bad, what is not
wanted, or both. Considering only what is thrown away at home, an average
American wastes an annual total of 197 pounds of food, about the weight of
WASTE(LESS): A
PSYCHOLOGICAL
APPROACH TOWARD
REDUCING FOOD
WASTE
Bridgette Kelly ’12
University of St. Thomas
Mentor
Christie Manning, Ph.D.
Visiting Assistant Professor of
Environmental Psychology
Macalester College
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