Plate Waste Generated by Spanish Households and Out-of-Home Consumption: Results from the ANIBES Study

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

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.

Environmental and Political Determinants of Food Choices: A Preliminary Study in a Croatian Sample

Production, processing, transporting, selling, and consumption of food are highly resource intensive. Therefore, if they are not well managed the consequences for the environment are far-reaching. This study aimed at investigating behaviors and attitudes of the Croatian population concerning the influence of environmental and political determinants of food choices, and the socio-demographic factors associated with pro-environmental behavior. Data analysis involved a non-probabilistic sample of 1534 adult participants from Croatia who responded to a validated questionnaire from November 2017 to March 2018. To test differences between sociodemographic groups, Welch’s t-test (two groups) and ANOVA (multiple groups) were used. The relationship between age and motivators of food choices was analyzed with Pearson’s r correlation coefficient. Participants reported a neutral rate of agreement with the items, with the exception of items related to food waste and food origin, for which they expressed a moderate amount of agreement. Socio-demographic factors that influence environmentally or politically concerned food choices in our study were age (older participants, p < 0.001), gender (women in comparison to men, p < 0.05), education level (higher education in comparison to elementary/high school, p < 0.05), marital status (married/cohabiting in comparison to unmarried, p < 0.05), responsibility for food supply (those who are responsible for food supply in comparison to those who are not responsible for food supply, p < 0.05), eating practices (participants with specific eating practices in comparison to participants without specific eating practices, p < 0.05), and smoking (those who have never smoked score and those who used to smoke in comparison to active smokers, p < 0.05). The results show that there are no statistically significant differences in environmental and political determinants of food choices based on the place of residence and employment status. The findings indicate that environmental and political determinants do not play a significant role in the food choices among the Croatian population.