Who is to Blame for Food Waste?

Eliot M. Martin, Eliza M. Hallett, Linlin Fan, Brenna Ellison and Norbert L.W. Wilson

Choices: The Magazine of Food, Farm, and Resource Issues, 2025, vol. 39, issue 4

Abstract: Food waste has commanded growing attention in recent years, with recent estimates suggesting that people fail to consume as much as 40% of food grown globally (Parfitt, Barthel, and Macnaughton, 2010; Buzby, FarahWells, and Hyman, 2014). Given the potential magnitude of food waste, researchers and policy makers are working to lower food waste, as noted in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 12.3 (reduce food waste by 50% by 2030). Policy makers need the citizenry’s support to use policy to affect this change, but, as Oliver and Lee (2005, p. 926) stated, “Politicians are unlikely to pass laws that would offend large portions of their constituents and policies that aim to change individual behavior must be seen as legitimate by their target populations.” Thus, support is contingent on which stakeholder citizens view as contributing to the problem (Lusk and Ellison, 2013; Thibodeau, Perko, and Flusberg, 2015). In this article, we study an unexplored area of food waste: attribution of blame. We assess consumers’ attribution of blame for food waste to different stakeholders and analyze blame attribution predictors. Following the extant literature on blame attribution and obesity, we argue that the motivation to action and accept policy change has a root in individuals’ blame for a societal problem.

Keywords: Agricultural and Food Policy; Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety; Food Security and Poverty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/349232/files/Choices%2039_4.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:aaeach:349232

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.349232

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Choices: The Magazine of Food, Farm, and Resource Issues from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().