Join The Revolution Against Food Waste

THE PROBLEM

It is estimated that around a third of all food in the world is wasted, leading to a loss of approximately $680 billion for developing countries every year (FAO,2019). Approximately two thirds of this money is lost through food wastage that occurs in homes and restaurants. Although a lot of food is wasted during the retail stage (Buzby et al., 2014), research suggests that most waste comes from consumers, especially in more developed countries (Krzywoszynska, 2011). It is estimated that the average UK household throws out £800 worth of food every year (Wrap, 2018).

WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?

One of the main reasons food waste is an important issue to tackle is that with an increasing global population, more food is necessary to feed everyone. According to the predictions of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2010), the world population could reach 9.3 billion by 2050. Even with a population of around 7.6 billion people in 2018, it has been found that around 124 million people lived in a household that could not provide sufficient food for all members in 51 developing countries (World Food Programme, 2018). It has been shown, though, that increasing food production is not  the necessary solution. The one billion people that are now starving on our planet could be fed using about one quarter of the total food wasted by Europe, the USA and the UK (Global Feedback, 2019).

Furthermore, food waste comes with important environmental implications. For example, cattle production leads to emissions of greenhouse gases and the transportation of food leads to air pollution by trucks (Buzby et al., 2014). According to the Bio Intelligence Service (2010), this represents 3% of all emissions created by the countries of the European Union in 2008.

Other reports inform us that if food waste could be thought of as a country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases, after the USA and China (FAO, 2019).

Reducing food waste could, therefore, be an easy and accessible way for individuals to make an impact in reducing its detrimental environmental effects.

MOTIVATION

We asked ourselves how we could contribute to diminishing the problem of food wastage within Warwick University. In the past few years, the University has been proactive in adhering to projects aiming to create a more sustainable environment.

Students are continuously reminded of the policies adopted by the University in tackling environmental issues. Examples include the elimination of paper cups, which used to be located near water dispensers, the implementation of paper straws instead of plastic ones, and energy use kept to a minimum within campus facilities.

But what about food waste? We noticed we couldn’t find anything around campus indicating the University’s perspective nor engagement with the matter.

Is the University concerned with the problem? Is it taking initiative in fighting this pressing issue?

We started by posing ourselves these questions and were eager to getting some answers.

OUR INTERVENTION

Phase 1: Approaching the food outlets around campus

The first thing we did was gain information on how the University is currently dealing with the issue of food waste. We personally went around the main food outlets on campus: The Library Café, the Dirty Duck, Fusion Bar, and Xananas. We were able to speak to the supervisors and managers of all four restaurants and asked them whether they were following any procedures to reduce food waste at these outlets.

They all gave us a similar response informing us that they are following several strategies implemented by the University to tackle the issue of food waste on campus. They informed us that all wasted cooking oil and food waste from the University’s kitchens is collected by olleco.co.uk and converted into biodiesel and biogas, respectively.

They did admit, however, that the majority of food waste within their outlets does not come from their kitchens, rather from what is leftover in students’ plates, and later disposed of. They informed us that, although they’ve managed to reduce food waste over the past four years, at the end of the day, how much food is wasted is dependant on the customer.

Pleased to hear that the University is actively engaging in the matter on its own part, we decided that more could be done, and our main target for decreasing food waste on campus became the students consuming food, rather than the food outlets.

Phase 2: Posters and Flyers

We decided, then, that our main focus was to encourage students to reduce food waste on their plates. As mentioned above, although food waste is already taken seriously by the University, students are not aware of it, nor are they instructed on how they can contribute to defeating the problem.

Thus, we chose to create posters and flyers to be distributed around campus so that students could be reminded of the issue of food waste and guided on how they could make a difference in solving it. According to Ratner and Miller (2001), the motive of self-interest is extremely powerful in shaping human behavior, meaning that actions are more likely to be carried out whenever they satisfy one’s own interest. We decided to follow this principle and thought of something that could benefit both the environment and the students themselves.

Posters and flyers in Figure 1 encourage students to take any leftover food they may have on their plates and bring it back home, rather than disposing of it. Their design is based on the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), and particularly on its peripheral route to persuasion . We also incorporated theories on social group identities and social attribution.

These are all explained in more detail below.

Figure 1

Phase 3: Spreading awareness

Once we had created the posters and flyers, we had to find a way for them to be seen by students on campus. We thought that the best place for posters to be hung was within the food outlets themselves. For this phase our target behavior was no longer that of the students, rather of those managing the food outlets. For these purposes we implemented a few persuasion strategies.

We returned to the several food outlets on campus and decided to use the “foot-in-the-door” technique,” which consists of getting someone to grant a larger request, after having granted a smaller one in advance (Freedman & Fraser, 1966). This technique is based on Bem’s self-perception theory (1972). It contends that individuals, upon agreeing with a small request, then make an inference regarding their own behaviour and the type of person they are, becoming  more inclined to comply with a subsequent request (Pliner et al, 1974).

We communicated the idea of decreasing food waste even further to the managers and, as our first (and smaller) request, we asked them whether we could send them an email so that they could take a look at our posters, to which they happily agreed.

After having sent them our posters, for our second (and larger) request we asked them whether it would be possible for them to hang them within their outlets. Unfortunately, they all declined our request because of the University’s policies, according to which no posters can be hung within these premises. This episode reminded us about Jia Jang’s Ted Talk on his 100 days of rejection, and we decided to see how we could transform this negative answer into more helpful information. We followed up each of their emails, asking for suggestions regarding how we could get our posters to be seen around campus. We were happy to see that 50% of the people we contacted were happy to support us in this task. They provided us with contacts from the SU Marketing team, who we could get in touch with to put up our posters around campus. We then noticed that perhaps what started as a foot-in-the-door technique (Freedman & Fraser, 1966) transformed into a door-in-the-face technique, where an initial rejection to a larger request is then followed by compliance to a smaller request (Cialdini, 1975).

We contacted the SU Marketing team, who kindly approved of our project after seeing our posters and agreed to hang them around campus, in locations visible to the students.

To ensure that our message was received by many students, we decided to take our project further and printed out a number of flyers, replicating the same exact visuals of the poster. We distributed them all around campus and placed them in strategic spots, such as on SU tables and Library desks. The aim was to increase students’ attention and attraction towards the matter by inducing familiarity via the mere exposure effect: ensuring students become familiar with the message from repeated exposure (Zajonc, 1968).

ELABORATION LIKELIHOOD MODEL (ELM)

The chosen persuasion technique for our project is embedded in the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM). The ELM, developed by Petty et al. (1984), is a dual process model, thus it engages two persuasion routes that can facilitate attitude and behaviour change. These are namely the central and peripheral routes. The central route of the ELM incurs behaviour change in the receiver as the result of them carefully considering and examining the presented arguments. In this instance, persuasion is achieved by presenting detailed, logical and convincing information. Therefore, this requires high motivation and cognitive resources from the receiver. On the other hand, the peripheral route of the ELM is activated whenever  the receiver has low motivation and insufficient cognitive resources (Petty et al, 1984). It uses superficial cues, which are able to attract the receiver’s attention and lead to behaviour change, without the need for cognitive effort.

Research suggests that individual differences and situational influences impact what persuasion route is activated in receivers (Bitner et al, 1985). To choose what persuasion route we should employ for this study, we conducted a pilot study on our target audience. This involved sampling forty students. We first asked students if they would be motivated to read an information loaded, eye catching poster in their surrounding environment. Of the 40 students sampled, 78% responded with ‘unlikely’ and the other 22% said it would depend on the information on the poster. Secondly, we asked students to describe posters that had recently caught their attention around campus. This led us to discover that the main features of these memorable posters included striking images, bright colours and catchy slogans. All of which are characteristic of the peripheral route to persuasion. Considering this, we designed our poster based on this route.

The central message we wanted to convey to students was to encourage them to take home their leftover food by asking for a doggy bag, rather than disposing of it. Our main technique to attract students’ attention is embedded in the slogan,  “Fancy a free meal?”. This intends to induce positive affect in students and specifically curiosity, an innate human desire that causes them to act to acquire further information (Hsee et al, 2016). Therefore, this incentive driven by curiosity leads students to read further and adhere to the main message . Furthermore, the induced positive affective state makes it more likely for students to adopt heuristic processing strategies making them more susceptible to the influence of weak arguments (Bohner et al., 1992). This appeals to the system one thinking style which is automatic, fast and unconscious (Chaiken et al, 1989).

To strengthen this effect, the slogan is on a bright, eye catching yellow colour and surrounded by images of tempting high calories foods, which may also play on the audience’s appetite and affect, increasing their susceptibility to the message (Killgore et al, 2007). Additionally, we included a clear and shocking statistic, “600, 000 tonnes of food waste a year,” as research shows that participants perceive facts to advance the credibility and reliability of the message compared to narratives (Good, 2010). Essentially, this aims to evoke the same effect experts’ recommendations have on impacting receivers’ attitudes; by perceiving them to be more credible, they are more likely to embrace the message (Shih et al, 2015).

SOCIAL GROUP IDENTITIES AND SOCIAL ATTRIBUTION

Along with ideas we took from the elaboration likelihood model, we also chose to incorporate theories based on social group identities and social attribution.

On our poster, we highlight how “students who care about food waste take their leftover food home.” As these posters were hung up and distributed around Warwick University campus, the majority of our audience is students. The use of the term ‘students’ here, according to theories based around social groups, creates an “in-group effect” wherein a part of the individual’s self concept is based around their knowledge of their belonging to a social group (Tajfel, 1981). As the principle of an in-group emphasizes the idea of unity and shared norms and values, we can infer from this theory that individuals will internalize the notion of caring about food waste as a given shared norm. We also introduce the concept of “Join the revolution” against food waste, further underlining the idea of a shared belief within the in-group. Further it should highlight the existence of a common goal, only to be obtained through the formation of a joint group, collectively working towards the elimination of food waste. Following from this is also the idea of social attribution, which is the notion that a part of our self-identity is based around what other individuals expect of us. This is especially significant in terms of the social groups we belong to and hence the roles we are expected to play in society. Hence, saying that “students who care about food waste take their leftover food home” is highlighting a role and expectation society has for students who claim to care about food waste (Miller et al., 1975).

References

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Bio Intelligence Service (2010). Preparatory Study on Food Waste Across EU 27. Retrieved from http://ec.europa.eu/environment/eussd/pdf/bio_foodwaste_report.pdf

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