Understanding individual behavior and moral judgments on food waste in a university cafeteria

Download

10433805.pdf

Date

2021-11-18

Author

Özokcu, Selin

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

604
views

286
downloads

Along with the global food crisis, climate change, population growth, urbanization, enlarging middle class, and shifts in consumption patterns, food waste became a severe problem to tackle. Around one-third of produced food, which approximates to 1.3 billion tonnes per year, has been globally wasted throughout the food supply chain. A considerable literature has proliferated around the theme of food waste; and yet the drivers of consumer-level food waste in emerging economies remains unattended. This dissertation aims to understand why and how students produce plate leftovers in the university cafeteria and justify their food wasting practices by applying two approaches. First, apart from the traditional variables of the Theory of Planned Behavior framework, it tests the effects of perceived portion size, taste and palatability, perceived value for money, and self-reported environmental behavior on students’ behavior of leaving plate waste by surveying 479 students in the METU Cafeteria. Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Structural Equation Modeling results revealed that all factors, except attitudes and subjective norms, significantly affected the students’ behavior regarding food waste in the university cafeteria. Moreover, a follow-up study is conducted to understand students’ food wasting practice and justifications by interviewing 15 students. At this stage, Boltanski and Thévenot’s Economies of Worth framework is adopted to uncover the moral complexity of wasting food practices. Findings elucidate that the students employed various moral regimes to justify their food wasting practice and developed strategies to eliminate food waste. Overall, the present research contributes to understanding the complex issue of wasting food in the METU Cafeteria from two different theoretical and methodological perspectives.

Subject Keywords

Food waste, Theory of planned behavior, Consumer behavior, Morality of consumption, Economies of worth

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/94950

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Environmental sustainability assessment using dynamic Autoregressive-Distributed Lag simulations-Nexus between greenhouse gas emissions, biomass energy, food and economic growth Sarkodie, Samuel Asumadu; Strezov, Vladimir; Weldekidan, Haftom; Asamoah, Ernest Frimpong; Owusu, Phebe Asantewaa; Doyi, Israel Nutifafa Yawo (Elsevier BV, 2019-06-10) Increasing population demand has triggered the enhancement of food production, energy consumption and economic development, however, its impact on climate change has become a global concern. This study applied a novel environmental sustainability assessment tool using dynamic Autoregressive-Distributed Lag (ARDL) simulations for model estimation of the relationships between greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, energy, biomass, food and economic growth for Australia using data spanning from 1970 to 2017. The stud...
Generation of food security sensitive regional development strategies through agricultural commodity value chains – case of south eastern anatolia region wheat value chain. Gümüş, Müg; Pınarcıoğlu, Mehmet Melih; Department of City and Regional Planning (2019) Currently, dramatic increase in world population, rapid urbanization of world population, changes in food demand and dietary composition, increasing pressure on limited natural resources, escalating climate change effect and fluctuating food prices result in a huge emphasis on food security studies as a contemporary issue .As a subject, food security studies tend to be considered at national or household level in a top-down approach and they are likely to handle the issue as restricted to a single sector (m...
Comparative Life Cycle Assessment of Uranium Recovery from Brine Altay, Melike Benan; Kalıpçıoğlu, Ceyda; Kurt, Zöhre (2022-06-01) With the increase in world population and the associated increase in raw material, clean water and energy demands, seeking for innovative and sustainable methods to decrease human-made environmental footprint becomes a task of utmost importance to reduce emissions and waste generation. Uranium-based atomic energy generation has an enormous potential to efficiently supply energy demand at the cost of high environmental impact on water bodies. Therefore, estimating the environmental impacts of the uranium rec...
Overcoming basis risk in agricultural index insurance using crop simulation modeling and satellite crop phenology Hesamı Afshar, Mehdı; Foster, Timothy; P. Higginbottom, Thomas; Parkes, Ben; Hufkens, Koen; Mansabdar, Sanjay; Ceballos, Francisco; Kramer, Berber (2021-04-19) Extreme weather causes substantial damage to livelihoods of smallholder farmers globally and are projected to become more frequent in the coming decades as a result of climate change. Index insurance can theoretically help farmers to adapt and mitigate the risks posed by extreme weather events, providing a financial safety net in the event of crop damage or harvest failure. However, uptake of index insurance in practice has lagged far behind expectations. A key reason is that many existing index insurance p...
An Investigation on Benefit-Cost Analysis of Greenhouse Structures in Antalya Sarı, Ramazan; Pekeriçli, Mehmet Koray (2020-11-12) Significant population increase across the world, loss of cultivable land and increasing demand for food put pressure on agriculture. To meet the demand, greenhouses are built, which are, light structures with transparent cladding material in order to provide controlled microclimatic environment proper for plant production. Conceptually, greenhouses are similar with manufacturing buildings where a controlled environment for manufacturing and production have been provided and proper spaces...

Citation Formats

S. Özokcu, “Understanding individual behavior and moral judgments on food waste in a university cafeteria,” Ph.D. - Doctoral Program, Middle East Technical University, 2021.