Capturing Young People’s Interest in Food Waste Reduction: An Approach Using Qualitative Reasoning

Abstract

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) more than one third of the food produced globally is lost or wasted. This tremendous amount of food waste highlights the urgent need to investigate this phenomenon promptly with powerful methods in order to reduce it. In the present work, we consider a qualitative reasoning approach in an attempt to understand people’s interest in the food waste (FW) problem. To do so, we have run an in-person taste experiment and have acquired data from 188 participants. We apply a measure based on a cosine similarity to capture the degree of interest towards the environment as individuals respond to the New Environmental Paradigm scale (NEP). Previously, they had to decide on whether a piece of fruit allegedly coming from the supermarket is better than another one allegedly coming from an alternative source such as applications designed to reduce food waste. We are using the taste experiment and the questions as a base to gain a more in-depth understanding of the drivers behind FW.