A note on modelling household food waste behaviour

ABSTRACT

Food waste is increasingly recognized as a global challenge, with both public and private efforts aimed at reducing food waste from farm to fork. However, analyses of food waste often fail to treat the problem as an economic phenomenon, where consumers’ utility maximizing decisions result in discarded food. In an effort to guide future research, this article presents a conceptual model of household food waste, showing that decisions to discard food depend on food prices and wage and nonwage income.

KEYWORDS:

• Food waste
• household production model
• consumer preferences

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• D11
• Q10
• D13

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Our approach differs from Höjgård, Jansson, and Rabinowicz (2013) and Morris and Holthausen (1994) who conceptualize waste as a by-product of production (i.e. waste is an increasing function of the amount of raw food input used). In their approaches, there is a production function for waste that, in the case of Morris and Holthausen (1994), also indirectly enters the utility function via recycling (which is defined as the amount of waste less that conventionally disposed).