Elsevier

Food Policy

Volume 98, January 2021, 101896
Food Policy

Does dietary knowledge affect household food waste in the developing economy of China?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodpol.2020.101896Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Dietary knowledge has a significant effect on household food waste.

  • More developed communities tend to have higher food waste.

  • There is an offsetting effect between dietary knowledge and community development.

  • The effect of dietary knowledge is heterogeneous with household features and income.

Abstract

Based on the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS) data for 2004, 2006, and 2009, this study employs a fixed-effects model to examine the impacts of the dietary knowledge of household food decision makers on the quantity of household food waste in terms of amount and calories levels. Specifically, the interaction effect between dietary knowledge and community development is explored. The results indicate that the dietary knowledge of the household food decision maker significantly impacts food waste and calories loss. With the development of the local community, the impacts of dietary knowledge on household food waste and calories loss seem to decrease. The heterogeneous impacts of dietary knowledge on food waste and calories loss in urban and rural areas and among different income groups are also observed. The findings contribute toward a better understanding of the issues related to household food waste and calories loss in China in the context of economic development and residents’ increasing dietary knowledge.

Introduction

Food waste refers to food appropriate for human consumption that is discarded or left to spoil in the food system (HLPE, 2014). The problem of food waste is currently increasing (Girotto et al., 2015). Globally, growing volumes of food are lost or wasted (Canali et al., 2017): one quarter to one third of all food produced is wasted (Bellemare et al., 2017). Increasing food waste has serious negative implications for food security, the global environment, the climate, water and land resources, nutritional health, and the economy (Canali et al., 2017, Conrad et al., 2018, Dorward, 2012, Garnett, 2011, Graham-Rowe et al., 2014, Hall et al., 2009, Liu et al., 2013, Munesue et al., 2015, Parizeau et al., 2015, Thyberg and Tonjes, 2016, Usubiaga et al., 2017, Venkat, 2011). Furthermore, wasting food is recognized as a rare problem affecting the achievement of economic goals in terms of food security, environmental sustainability, and farm-financial security (Garcia-Herrero et al., 2018, Richards and Hamilton, 2018, Yu and Abler, 2014, Yu and Abler, 2016).

Given the important implications of food waste, it is a topic of widespread concern for the stakeholders including researchers, policy makers, international organizations, and grassroots movements (Canali et al., 2017, Chaboud and Daviron, 2017, FAO, 2011, HLPE, 2014, Schanes et al., 2018), as it is related to food security, environmental protection, and social morality. Many studies have been conducted worldwide to seek possible methods of reducing food waste (Garrone et al., 2014, Halloran et al., 2014). Some studies have estimated and investigated food waste and the related nutrition loss in developed countries (Buzby and Hyman, 2012, Conrad et al., 2018, Garcia-Herrero et al., 2018, Secondi et al., 2015). However, uncertainty in the measurement of food waste remains a concern (Chaboud and Daviron, 2017, Koester, 2015), and the differences in statistical measures render most findings incomparable. Give to these differentiations in the measures and conclusions of food waste in existing studies, systematic reviews of a wide range of literature have also been conducted to better understand food waste (Canali et al., 2017, Girotto et al., 2015, Sheahan and Barrett, 2017).

Moreover, numerous studies have analyzed food waste for different commodities, at different stages of the food chain, the determinants and impacts thereof, and related policies (Beretta et al., 2013, Calvo-Porral et al., 2017, Hall et al., 2009, Halloran et al., 2014, Muriana, 2017, Visschers et al., 2016, Yu and Abler, 2014, Yu and Abler, 2016). For instance, Di Muro et al. (2016) focused on the food waste of food retailers, finding a significant impact of consumer preference for “misfit” vegetables.1 Bremmers and Meulen (2016) reviewed the impact of legal aspects on food waste, but did not offer sufficient empirical evidences. Based on a survey of 244 Romanian consumers, Stefan et al. (2013) found that consumers’ planning and shopping routines might contribute to avoiding food waste. While the impact of food waste on climate and greenhouse gas emissions attracts widespread attention (Moult et al., 2018), Bryngelsson et al. (2016) revealed that reducing food waste could lower emissions only by 1–3% and played a minor role in meeting climate targets. As global food demand continues to rise because of population and consumption growth, food waste has emerged as an important policy issue (Canali et al., 2017, Stephen and Timothy, 2019). For instance, in Italy the reform of its food waste policy includes the donation of food directly after the best-before date and significantly simplified the bureaucracy around donations (Busetti, 2019). Overall, these previous studies provide an important reference for understanding the issues related to food waste.

During different stages of economic development, the proportion of food waste varies according to food categories and along the food chain (Dou et al., 2016, FAO, 2011, Parfitt et al., 2010). For example, 25% of consumers in the EU waste cereals, against only 1% in Africa (HLPE, 2014). According to the literature, the generation of food waste along the food value chain occurs in most stages from field to fork, including in agricultural production, postharvest handling and trade, manufacture processing, food services, wholesale, retail, and final household consumption (Beretta et al., 2013, Bilska et al., 2016, Calvo-Porral et al., 2017, Di Muro et al., 2016, Girotto et al., 2015, Halloran et al., 2014, Liu et al., 2013, Muriana, 2017). In Africa, food waste mostly occurs in the processing and distribution stages, while in North America and Europe it is evident in the consumption stage (FAO, 2011, HLPE, 2014). These differences in the generation of food waste imply that the policy design to reduce it should be location-targeted and subject to the development stage.

Regarding the last stage in the food chain, previous studies have related socioeconomic development with household food waste (Garcia-Herrero et al., 2018, Liu, 2014, Stefan et al., 2013, Thyberg and Tonjes, 2016, Visschers et al., 2016). In general, household food waste occurs in the time between when food reaches the consumer and when it is eaten (Alexander et al., 2017). The sources of food and drinks consumed at home include retail as well as home-grown food and takeaways (Parfitt et al., 2010). A household’s decision to waste (as opposed to the decision to save or keep food) is usually made under income constraints (Thyberg and Tonjes, 2016). Daniel (2016) found that low-income households in the United States bought less fresh high-value food than higher-income consumers, because they were more risk-averse regarding waste. High-income households were more willing to waste food in the hope that their family would eventually acquire a taste for healthier choices. In high-income countries, the food waste generated at the household level represents about half the total food waste, making this stratum one of the biggest contributors to this problem (Calvo-Porral et al., 2017, Stancu et al., 2016). It is expected that households worldwide will generate an increasing volume of food waste alongside the income growth of populations in developing countries. Despite this, there has been less attention on food waste at the household level (Ellison and Lusk, 2018), although the topic is an important policy concern (Hebrok and Boks, 2017, Richards and Hamilton, 2018).

Food waste remains poorly understood in developing countries such as China, despite growing media coverage and public concerns in recent years (Liu, 2014). China, the world’s most populous country, is experiencing dramatic changes in its society because of rapid economic growth, and increasing food waste has become a widespread concern. Given the population, any changes in China’s food waste can have marked consequences (Song et al., 2015). For example, if the average rice waste is 1 kg per capita per year, the total wasted rice for the country’s population of 1.4 billion people will total around 1.4 million tons, almost equalling to the Philippines’ rice imports from July 2018 to June 2019. Several studies on food waste in China have been conducted, most focusing on food waste at the macro level and assessing the economic and environmental effects thereof (Liu et al., 2013, Sun et al., 2018, Wen et al., 2016). However, as mentioned, little is known about the generation of food waste at the household level. For instance, Song et al. (2015) calculated the carbon, water, and ecological footprints of household food waste in China, revealing that while the food waste per capita is relatively small, the large population means that the total food waste in the country is very high. Wen et al. (2016) evaluated the economic and environmental performance of food waste treatment pilot projects in Suzhou City, China, finding that in 2013, the amount of food waste was equivalent to an average daily energy output of 27,500 m3 of biogas and 30 tons per day of biodiesel, a daily net profit of 82,055 Chinese Yuan under normal operation. A report by Liu (2014) provided estimates of food losses and waste in China; however, these statistics relied on data published in literature and not on a direct assessment of household food waste.

Household food waste is generated from the process of food consumption at home in many ways, and consumers’ dietary knowledge may play a role. Consumers may discard fresh products considered non-edible in terms of freshness and color, for example, as those who are more risk-averse tend to throw out foods close to, at, or beyond the best-before date (Ellison and Lusk, 2018). Large quantities of wholesome edible food are often unused or left over and discarded from household kitchens, especially after celebrations or festivals. This implies that consumers’ dietary knowledge would be an important factor in their decision to transform inedible/edible food into food waste. Internationally, improving dietary knowledge has been shown to help people adjust their eating behavior and nutritional intake (Ren et al., 2019, Shimokawa, 2013, Zhao and Yu, 2019). Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that dietary knowledge is linked to what and how much food should go to waste (Bonaccio et al., 2013, Nayga, 2000, Wagner et al., 2016). However, as far as we know, no study has investigated the effect of consumers’ dietary knowledge on household food waste.

In this study, we use household-level panel data to analyze household food waste in China and estimate the impacts of the dietary knowledge of the household food decision maker on the amount and calories level of food waste (Tian and Yu, 2015). Different studies adopt different definitions of food waste (Bellemare et al., 2017, Calvo-Porral et al., 2017, Ellison and Lusk, 2018, HLPE, 2014, Secondi et al., 2015, Stefan et al., 2013). FAO (2019) defined food waste as the decrease in the quantity or quality of food resulting from decisions and actions by retailers, food services and consumers, while household food waste throughout this paper is defined as the total food loss and waste happening at the final stage by consumers. Here, household food waste is measured by the quantity of the food wasted by a household over three days at home, excluding food for composting and/or for animal feed (CHNS, 1991, FAO., 2019). Furthermore, we also consider whether food waste varies significantly with the development of and changes in the socioeconomic environment proxied by the development index of local communities.

In the estimation strategy, first, a household fixed-effects model can control for unobserved factors that hardly change over a short period and can connect food waste and dietary knowledge. Second, we introduced individual, household, and community characteristics into the fixed-effects model as proxies for (at least part of) changes in unobserved time-varying food availability (as opposed to food waste). Third, because consumers’ characteristics may systematically differ depending on whether high-value food2 comprises a large component of food consumption (as opposed to food waste), we examined the robustness of our estimation results by employing the subsample of the wasting of high-value food. Finally, a series of heterogeneity analyses were conducted to estimate household food waste and nutrition loss in urban and rural areas and among income groups.

The contribution to the literature on food waste in China is threefold. First, we analyze food waste at the final stage of the food supply chain, namely consumption, in China. Of the food wasted along the food chain, that in the consumption stage increases to around one third when countries moved from being low-income to middle and high-income (HLPE, 2014). Given the larger proportion of food waste at the consumption stage, better understanding the trends and determinants thereof would help policy makers design better policy portfolios to reduce this phenomenon. Second, our study used the actual food waste recorded during the consumption stage at home, providing a sound measurement thereof (Bellemare et al., 2017). Third, we obtained detailed data on food items including fresh products and the leftovers of edible food discarded from household kitchens. Thus, we could convert the mass of the food wasted into a caloric measurement, similar to the study of Hall et al. (2009). Food waste is widely measured by its quantity or value (Bellemare et al., 2017), and using nutrition loss as a result thereof enables better understanding the phenomenon in terms of the dimensions of nutritional value and food security. Finally, relatively little research assesses the dynamics of household food waste (Parizeau et al., 2015). Thus, the panel data used in this study provides insights into the trend for household food waste in China.

In the next section, we introduce the conceptual framework and econometric modeling approach. Section 3 briefly presents the data source and basic descriptive statistics, and Section 4 reports and discusses the empirical results as well as the heterogeneity analysis. The last section concludes.

Section snippets

Household production and food waste

The theoretical framework of household food waste is usually developed based on the principles of consumer theory (Katare et al., 2017, Richards and Hamilton, 2018). We set up a theoretical model based on household production theory (Deaton and Muellbauer, 1980, Lancaster, 1966), as consumers produce an amount of calories/nutrient Zm (m represents calories or a type of nutrient, such as protein) from N food products Qn (n = 1….N) with the cost Cml (Deaton and Muellbauer, 1980, pp. 252-253):Zm=n

Sample

The dataset used for this study is from the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS)3, which is an international collaborative project between the National Institute of Nutrition and Food Safety at China Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Carolina Population

Estimation results

Following the empirical model and estimation procedure described above, Eq. (5) was step-wisely estimated through both random-effects and fixed-effects Tobit regressions. Thereafter, Hausman tests were conducted to justify the selection of the random and fixed effects models. As Table 3, Table 4 show, the results of all Hausman tests indicate that the fixed-effects models are more suitable for the estimates for food waste and calories loss. The fixed effects Tobit regression does not only

Conclusions

This study investigated household food waste in China and the resulting calories loss by focusing on the impacts of dietary knowledge. The results reveal that improving food decision makers’ dietary knowledge could significantly influence food waste and calories loss. Furthermore, dietary knowledge has significant interaction effects with urbanization and community development on food waste and calories loss. That is, there is an offsetting effect between dietary knowledge and community

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Shi Min: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Visualization, Investigation, Formal analysis, Writing - original draft. Xiaobing Wang: Conceptualization, Methodology, Supervision, Validation, Writing - review & editing. Xiaohua Yu: Data curation, Methodology.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Sciences of China (71673008) and Huazhong Agricultural University Scientific & Technological Self-innovation Foundation (2019). This research uses data from China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS). We thank the National Institute for Nutrition and Health, China Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Carolina Population Center (P2C HD050924, T32 HD007168), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the NIH (R01-HD30880, DK056350, R24

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