Reducing Food Waste Through Consumer Education, Part 2

Javary Brown, written in 2017 by Oregon University Law School candidate Harvard Law School's Food Law and Summer Interns of Policy Clinic.

Consumer education enhances awareness about the impact of garbage and identifies the steps to waste food by storing, storing, using, and reusing information on foods that we purchase, cook, and eat everyday Execution can be combined. The key will decrease. The NRDC agrees that there are human factors in behavior and attitudes to change food waste. For example, the NRDC recently partnered with the Advertising Committee to launch a campaign to reduce food waste. It may seem odd to regard commercial advertisements as an important element of large-scale legal work, but the public awareness raising campaign has been very successful in changing human attitudes and behaviors . According to the advertising committee statistics, since the advertising committee's "Friends Do not Let Friends Drunken" campaign began in 1983, 68% of Americans report that they are about to stop driving after drinking. The organization produced similar results to other activities and gathered more than $ 4.3 billion in United Black College Fund to support their minority education campaign. In the first year of the domestic violence reduction campaign, 34,000 calls were placed on the domestic violence prevention hotline. And it reduced the annual area caused by forest fires by almost 40%. Wildfire prevention campaign by "Smokey Bear" in 1944

The campaign to reduce garbage must be lively, flashy and ubiquitous. The expiration label must be clear and the language is as direct as possible. But in the end, standardized date labels are inadequate and consumer education is inadequate. If you combine these two well, we can get closer to a lean system. All of us need to change our mind. If we all know how much we should throw by meal and how much we have in climate change, we will either keep the remaining chicken bone in inventory, or for a snack You may choose to pack the rest of. We need to implement innovative solutions combining smart technology's new tools and grandmother's banana bread's old wisdom. The solution starts with public dialogue and ends when the proportion of food waste in our country reaches zero

Are you more interested? Please see the short film "Food waste expired in the USA". Collaboration of the Harvard Food Act and Policy Clinic to raise awareness about the effects of date labels on food waste

One way to handle food waste is to reduce its production. Consumers can plan grocery shopping, avoid spontaneous purchases that may be wasted, and reduce corruption by properly storing food. Extensive educational activities have proven to be an effective way to reduce food waste. The UK campaign called "love, hatred, waste" has raised awareness of precautionary measures to address food waste for consumers. Through information on advertisements, food storage and cooking, and in-store education, the UK observed a 21% reduction in household food waste, which was avoidable in 5 years. Another possible solution is "smart packaging". This indicates when the food is destroyed more accurately than the current expiration date, such as temperature sensitive ink, plastic that changes color when exposed to oxygen, plastic that changes color over time. gel

The good news is that there is a solution to food waste. Food waste occurs at all levels of the food supply chain, but consumers can avoid food waste at the front end by considering the amount at the time of food purchase, and by reducing the amount of waste food and beverage You can save 25%.

The waste of food is partly the result of supermarket operation. Therefore, food waste should be fundamentally solved, not simply solving problems in a consumer friendly way of reducing personal waste. If we really want to reverse the amount of food waste in the world, supermarkets not only get out of the store but also arrive, we must be responsible for the way they handle food. This is not to say that people should not properly save food and should not use leftovers - these are simple economic hypersensitivity. However, in order to make a big change, it is necessary to keep consumer focus away from consumers in order to highlight the situation behind the supermarket.