To significantly reduce the volumes of food currently wasted in industrialized countries,
tackling food waste on the household level is paramount. While awareness
campaigns and economic incentives are important measures, it is crucial to look beyond
individual decision making and scrutinize how contextual factors frame consumer
lifestyles in ways that intensify the issue of food going to waste. This paper
addresses the role of material contexts-in particular, infrastructures and Technologies-
in the shaping of food shopping and storing practices and thus consumer food
waste. It presents an in-depth, qualitative study with 24 Austrian households, conducted
from November 2016 to February 2017. Data were collected through food
waste diaries, semi-structured interviews and a total of 16 focus group discussions.
In line with other studies, we find that food waste is a largely unintended outcome of
entangled daily routines revolving around food, such as meal planning, grocery shopping
and food storing. The characteristics of food retail infrastructures-in terms of
accessibility, density and type-shape these routines and thus potentially influence
excess food purchases. Food storing practices as well depend on the characteristics
of domestic infrastructures and co-evolve with technologies used for storing food.
Unraveling the interconnectivity between material contexts and household food
practices can inform policy, product design and food retail development and thus has
implications for reducing consumer food waste.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VIENNA/oai:epub.wu-wien.ac.at:7012 |
| Date | January 2019 |
| Creators | Dobernig, Karin, Schanes, Karin |
| Publisher | Wiley |
| Source Sets | Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Article, PeerReviewed |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) |
| Relation | http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ijcs.12527, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/14706431, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5298-1136, http://epub.wu.ac.at/7012/ |
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