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Diners waste far less food when they're schooled on the harm their leftovers can inflict on the environment. But if they know the food is going to be composted instead of dumped in a landfill, the educational benefit disappears.
When composting enters the picture, educated diners waste just as much as those who haven't learned about shrinking landfill space, dangerous greenhouse gas emissions and water and soil pollution, a new study found.
This presents a tricky situation for policymakers figuring out how to manage food waste, because the top tactics are prevention (through education) and diversion (through composting), said lead researcher Danyi Qi, a graduate student in agricultural economics at The Ohio State University.
"When you do both, they cancel each other out -- they work at cross purposes," said Qi, who is presenting the findings this week at the annual meeting of the Allied Social Science Associations in Chicago.
The original article information is available on OSU's web site.
People don't feed their scraps to the dogs & hogs?
(Score: 1) by toddestan on Saturday January 07 2017, @07:03PM
There's one Mexican restaurant here that does something similar for it's "all you can eat tacos Tuesday" and "all you can eat enchiladas Wednesday". It's all you can eat, but you've got to flag down the waiter, tell them you want more food, wait for the kitchen to make them, and for the waiter to bring them out to you. They could obviously streamline the process, but they have no interest in doing so (and as far as I can purposely drag their feet a bit). So decent number of people probably just eat the initial small-ish portion they give you, and I'm guessing very few people are patient enough to stick it out for anything more than seconds. I'm sure it also helps them that most people are eating on their lunch break and don't have the time to wait around for more food to come out. The net effect is I've only been there a few times - if I'm hungry I'll go to the pizza or Chinese buffet. Or even Chipotle/Q'Doba where you'll get a decent amount of food quickly without the games.
Someone else pointed out that restaurants usually want to turn over tables faster. The place I mentioned probably gets away with this because it's fairly large and never seems to completely fill up. Otherwise, if it was smaller they'd want you to eat your fill and leave so they can seat someone else.
Many restaurants already give a choice with lunch menus and senior menus which are usually smaller portions at cheaper prices. One solution would be lift the restrictions on these menus to allow anyone to order off the lunch menu anytime.