The gaze of the gatekeeper: Unpacking the multi-level influences and interactions of household food waste through a video elicitation study

Highlights

• A video-elicitation methodology and multi-level perspective novel to the food waste literature is utilised in this study.

• Factors at the household level played a central role in influencing food provisioning decisions of the dietary gatekeeper.

• Dietary gatekeepers make food provisioning choices and decisions for their household within conditions imposed by the food industry (supermarkets and manufacturers).

• Dietary gatekeepers need to negotiate a number of trade-offs between micro, meso and macro level factors when shopping or cooking for their families.

• Food waste emerges from the gaps, cracks and compromises dietary gatekeepers are forced to make between interacting factors at multiple levels.

Abstract

Changing the household food waste related behaviours of consumers vital to the sustainable transformation of the global food system. This study utilised a video-elicitation methodology to explore the different factors that influence the food provisioning practices of the household dietary gatekeeper from a multi-level perspective, and to consider their food waste implications. Key findings included the central role of the household level in influencing food provisioning practices, the conditions imposed on households by the food industry, and the different trade-offs that are negotiated when shopping or cooking. Household food waste emerges from the gaps, cracks and compromises that dietary gatekeepers are forced to make between interacting factors at multiple levels. This study supports a move an exclusively individual level focus in food waste research to include greater consideration of the entire household, as well as the external conditions imposed upon them.

Introduction

There is growing recognition that the modern-day food system is a threat to human and planetary health and requires urgent transformation to avoid large scale environmental collapse (HLPE, 2014; Willett et al., 2019). The extraordinary levels of loss and waste currently inherent in the food system are part of this challenge (FAO, 2011, 2019; FUSIONS, 2014). Food that is produced, but never consumed, is associated with a broad spectrum of social, environmental and economic costs (FAO, 2014). These include greenhouse gas emissions, land degradation, unsustainable resource-use, increasing production costs, and threats to the long-term security of food production (HLPE, 2014; Neff et al., 2016).

The mounting sustainability implications of food waste have increased policy and research attention to this issue (Parfitt et al., 2010; Porpino, 2016; Young et al., 2017). However, despite substantial volumes of food waste from the domestic sector, research attention to the behavioural antecedents of household food waste is still relatively recent (Boulet et al., 2021; Schanes et al., 2018; Stangherlin and de Barcellos, 2018). To date, a range of consumer food provisioning behaviours (from purchasing to cooking to disposal) have been associated with food waste. In turn, a growing body of factors, such as demographics, attitudes, household dynamics and food packaging, have been identified as potential influencers of these behaviours and of household food waste (Principato, 2018; Secondi et al., 2015; Stangherlin and de Barcellos, 2018).

The relationship between household food waste, behaviour, and influencing factors is complex, multi-facted and resists simple explanatory models. Pioneering conceptual frameworks from Roodhuyzen et al (2017) and Quested et al (2013) attempt to model this complexity by framing multiple, contextually sensitive, causal pathways from which behaviour and food waste emerge.

Adding to these efforts, we recently developed a multi-level framework (see Fig. 1) of household food waste and consumer behaviour that recognizes the nested relationships between different context (or levels) and their associated factors (Boulet et al., 2021). Based on an extensive systematic review, the framework organizes known influencing factors at individual (micro), household (meso), and external to household (macro) levels (see Fig. 1). The general food provisioning practices (and their specific associated behaviours) of a consumer are the emergent property of interactions between different factors depicted across the levels in the framework. Household food waste is then the final outcome of the different behaviours enacted.

While the range of influencing factors on household food waste have been comprehensively explored (Boulet et al., 2021; Roodhuyzen et al., 2017; Schanes et al., 2018), much less attention has been given to the levels at which factors are located and their relative influence on food waste. Do particular levels exert a higher degree of influence on consumer behaviour and household food waste than others? Reid et al. (2010) have theorised that the household (meso) level is the ‘crucible’ of pro-environmental behaviours, mediating influences between different levels. Is this the case for food waste related behaviours? Do food waste policy makers and practitioners need to pay attention to particular levels (rather than single factors) to effectively tackle the problem?

The nested hierarchy in our framework also illustrates that influencing factors can be moderated, or even cancelled out, by factors that exist at other levels. For example, an individual may have particular food-related attitudes that would predict minimal amounts of food waste, yet this factor can be subsumed by the food related tastes and preferences of others in the home, leading to more food being wasted at the household level (Cappellini, 2009; Evans, 2011). Other studies and frameworks have addressed the possible interactions between factors (see for e.g. Aschemann-Witzel et al., 2015; Roodhuyzen et al., 2017), however, to the best of our knowledge, none have been empirically investigated from a multi-level perspective. Greater understanding of these relationships, as well as the relative influence of different levels, will assist food waste policy makers and practitioners in designing effective interventions that target factors and levels ‘that matter’ in order to influence consumer behaviour change.

This study explores the relevance of our conceptual framework for empirical research by conducting a multi-level investigation of household food waste factors, and interactions, from the perspective of the individual consumer. Our research asks: which factors and levels are relevant to an individual's behaviour and decision-making during household food provisioning practices? In addition, we consider what interactions between factors and levels are also evident.

We utilized a qualitative video-elicitation methodology to explore food provisioning from the perspective of the household member most responsible for shopping and cooking, i.e. the household's ‘dietary gatekeeper’ (Reid et al., 2015; Wijayaratne et al., 2020). Factors identified were then organized from a multi-level perspective to the relevant micro, meso and macro levels in the framework above. We focus on household food provisioning practices, and their associated behaviours, because as previously discussed, it is from these practices that household food waste emerges (Boulet et al., 2021; Principato, 2018; Roodhuyzen et al., 2017). Understanding the influencers of household food provisioning gives greater insight into the background conditions that generate food waste.

The next sections describe this study's research methodology, present the results, and discuss key emergent themes, including implications for behaviour change interventions that reduce food waste. We finish with a reflection on the pros, cons and opportunities of video-elicitation as a methodology that has not been extensively used in the research field of food waste and consumer behaviour.