Are the Slimmer More Wasteful? The Correlation between Body Mass Index and Food Wastage among Chinese Youth

Long Qian, Feng Li, Hongbo Liu and Lingen Wang
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Long Qian: Institute of Food and Strategic Reserves, Nanjing University of Finance and Economics, Nanjing 210023, China
Feng Li: School of Economics, Nanjing University of Finance and Economics, Nanjing 210023, China
Hongbo Liu: Innovation and Development Institute, Anhui University, Hefei 230039, China
Lingen Wang: Institute of Geographical Resources, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 3, 1-18

Abstract: With the economic growth and living standard improvement, food waste has become increasingly common among Chinese youth. To test whether body size affects the food waste performance of youth, we examined university students as representative of the Chinese youth and conducted a large-sample survey in 29 universities across 29 provinces. Based on 9192 questionnaires collected from Chinese college canteens, we found that body size was correlated with food waste. The smaller the body mass index (BMI) value, the higher the likelihood of plate waste, the higher the amount of waste, and the higher the ratio of food waste. Heterogeneity analyses revealed that BMI exerted a more significant impact on males than females, as well as a more substantial impact on northerners than southerners. Robust tests using other proxies to measure body size, robust regressions based on the new adjusted samples, and robust tests with an instrumental variable to overcome the endogenous issue suggested that the slimmer participants tended to be more wasteful. Hence, this study confirms that the slimmer youth tend to leave plate waste and waste more food per capita per meal. This study is the first attempt to analyze food wastage from the perspective of BMI in China to our best knowledge, and it provides a unique viewpoint for understanding young people’s food wastage.

Keywords: food waste; BMI; body size; Chinese youth; university students (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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