This blog was written by Chloe Alexander and Maggie Bain.

Food waste is an increasingly important societal problem that governments, businesses, academics, non-profit organizations, chefs and even celebrities are working to address. Seeing multiple actors getting involved is an exciting development, but it is important to reflect how knowledge about food waste is being mobilized and communicated to effectively catalyze further action.

Ineffective knowledge mobilization can confuse your audience, waste money, time, and energy, and interfere with efforts to reduce food waste. So how do you effectively mobilize knowledge about food waste? We compiled 3 helpful tips that we learned from our experiences in food waste knowledge mobilization and communication.

Tip # 1- Acknowledge That Food Waste Is Complicated

What do we mean when we say it’s complicated? Food loss and waste occurs everywhere that there is food, whether it’s on farms, fisheries, factories, grocery stores, restaurants, hospitals, schools or in your home[1]. There is no uniform definition for how to define food waste, but the Food and Agriculture Organization (2011, 2) provides the most widely agreed upon definition to capture the overall essence of food loss and waste:

“Food losses refer to the decrease in edible food mass throughout the part of the supply chain that specifically leads to edible food for human consumption. Food losses take place at production, postharvest and processing stages in the food supply chain (Parfitt et al., 2010). Food losses occurring at the end of the food chain (retail and final consumption) are rather called “food waste”, which relates to retailers’ and consumers’ behavior. (Parfitt et al., 2010).”[2]

Since food loss and waste occurs at so many parts of the supply chain, solving the problem of food loss and waste is equally as complicated as there as many different locations, groups, causes, and circumstances that are involved in this issue[3].

The amount and type of food waste as well as the causes of food waste differ for each of these locations. For example, loss on farms can result from pest infestations or not meeting aesthetic standards (i.e. colour, shape, size) stipulated in contracts with grocery stores, whereas waste in the home can result from our busy schedules or buying more groceries than we need[4]. It’s important to acknowledge differences like these when communicating the issue, and use sector and context-specific methods for addressing it, rather than simplifying the issue and using generalized methods.

Tip # 2 - Know Your Audience & Your Goal

Who are you communicating to? What are their interests and values? What is your goal in talking to them?

These are necessary questions to ask yourself when you are communicating to others about food waste. Not everyone has the same access to information, interest level, connection to the issue, or ability to act on the information that you share with them. Consider these factors and meet your audience where they are at in terms of crafting your message so that it is interesting to them, relates to their values, and encourages them to act.

A note on using ‘jargon’: jargon, or overcomplicated language, can exclude people and interfere with your ability to get your message across.

Chloe’s experience in talking about food waste with different audiences: I have met with retail and restaurant managers to convince them to prevent food waste by donating surplus to food security charities and I have also conducted workshops teaching high school students about food waste. The managers were concerned about resources that it would take to donate this food and food safety issues, which required me to meet them in person to explain how food waste donation could benefit their business. The students, on the other hand, were interested in learning about what food waste was, which required me to give a general overview of why food waste was a problem for our society and relate the problem to the context of their daily lives.

Tip # 3 - Don’t Just Talk to Your Audience, Engage Them

It’s not enough to raise awareness about food waste issues and hope that people will change their behaviour. Food waste is not an intentional action but, instead, is rooted in more complex social and cultural structures that people are not necessarily consciously aware of.[5] To engage your audience, you need to educate them about the issue, get them to care about it, and empower them to take action.[6]

Educating your audience can include informational campaigns that provide facts about food waste and increases peoples’ knowledge about the issue. For example, Love Food Hate Waste Canada has informational campaigns on their website as part of their engagement with consumers. It tells consumers about household food waste in Canada and gives them resources on how to plan meals and store food and prepare food appropriately.

Getting your audience to care about an issue means presenting your information in a way that they can emotionally connect with, like through films, public speaking, and art exhibits. This method engages your audience’s emotions, making it easier for them to relate your message to their own lives.  “Just Eat It” (2014) and “Wasted! The Story of Food Waste” (2017) are two films about food waste that aim to connect people with the lifecycles of their food, their daily habits, and the impacts food waste can have on people and the planet. An important caveat for engaging people emotionally is that emotions, such as guilt and fear, can sometimes deter people from changing their behaviour. So it is important to be conscious of which emotions you are trying to engage. For more on how emotions in knowledge mobilization can act as a barrier to effective communication, check out this Ted Talk that focuses on global warming.

Empowering your audience to take action involves giving them the opportunities, skills, and tools to change their behaviour. This type of engagement involves workshops, classes, and interventions. For example, the University of Guelph’s ‘”Supper Savers” program recruited young families in an 8 month program to learn about household food waste and preparing healthy meals. The families took part in a cooking class and got tips and tools to reduce food waste over the duration of the program, as well as learning about their own food waste habits over time.

Hopefully these three tips will help you next time you plan on mobilizing knowledge about food waste!

Maggie Bain and Chloe Alexander are both graduate students studying food waste. They have taken UNIV 6050 (Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Agri-Food Systems), which is class where students gain skills in the effective communication of scientific knowledge in the Agri-Food System.

Chloe is a PhD candidate in the department of Geography, Environment and Geomatics and her research examines policy development on the issue of food waste in Canada, particularly focusing on the industrial, commercial, and institutional (IC&I) sector of Canada’s agri-food system. Maggie Bain is studying for an M.A. in Geography and her research is focused on developing behaviour change interventions to help consumers reduce food waste in their households and shifting consumer behaviour towards circular food system practices. 

Sources:

[1] Gooch, M. et al. (2019). The avoidable crisis of food waste: Technical report. Value Management International & Second Harvest. https://secondharvest.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Avoidable-Crisis-of-Food-Waste-Technical-Report-January-17-2019.pdf

[2] Food and Agriculture Organization. (2011). Global food losses and food waste: Extent, causes, and prevention. http://www.fao.org/food-loss-and-food-waste/flw-data)#:~:text=In%202011%2C%20FAO%20presented%20the,lost%20or%20wasted%20every%20year.&text=Target%2012.3%20of%20the%20Sustainable,the%20production%20and%20supply%20chains.

[3] Nicholes, M.J. et al. (2019). Surely you don’t eat parsnip skins? Categorizing the edibility of food waste. Resources, Conservation and Recycling 147, 179-188. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resconrec.2019.03.004

[4] Gustavsson, J. et al. (2011). Global food losses and food waste: Extent, causes and prevention. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. http://www.fao.org/3/a-i2697e.pdf

[5] Quested. T. et al. (2013). Spaghetti soup: The complex world of food waste behaviour. Resources, Conservation, and Recycling 79, 43-51. 10.1016/j.resconrec.2013.04.011

[6] Lorenzoni,I. et al. (2007) Barriers perceived to engaging with climate change among the UK public and their policy implications. Global Environmental Change, 17(3-4), 445-459. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2007.01.004

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