Changing the Norms Around Food . . . for Climate Change
By Garrett Sumner
Published April 29, 2025.
I have been a substitute teacher at an elementary school, a waiter at a restaurant, and, like most people reading this, a patron of a grocery store. In all these roles, I have witnessed an astonishing amount of food waste. Kids, unsurprisingly, don’t eat all of their food when hanging out with their friends. From my observations over numerous shifts, only half of the customers at a Mexican restaurant will actually ever touch their side of rice and beans.[1] And I, as much as I try, am incredibly bad about buying more food than I can eat from the grocery store.
The funny thing about all of this is that the kids, customers, and myself, are rarely if ever chastised for throwing away the food. In fact, it is normal to see kids throw away their entire lunch and customers to only take a bite of their food and not ask for a to-go box. And, throwing away food from the previous week or two has almost become an unfortunate ritual for me.
Of course, the reasons to care about food waste are easy enough to see. I don’t need a citation to say that people still die from starvation in the world today. Wasted food is also bad for business because it reflects a waste of the labor, water, and energy that went into making the food. But it also contributes to a different problem—climate change. According to the World Wildlife Fund, food waste contributes 6%–8% of all human-generated greenhouse gases because the food we waste produces methane in the landfills it rots in.[2]
Thus, with the plethora of issues food waste contributes to, it is easy to see why this is a worthwhile issue to deal with. And people are dealing with it. Misfits Market works to save food, that would otherwise be wasted, at the farm and by suppliers to resell it to customers at a discounted price.[3] Too Good To Go is an app that connects customers to restaurants and stores that have a surplus of food, allowing the customers to buy that food at a discounted price.[4] And, in 2023, U.S. Congress passed the Food Donation Improvement Act, which reduces the risk of liability a donor of food would face if the food turned out to make someone sick.[5]
However, in developed countries, it is still normal to waste food. For the change to be fully realized, eating all of the food you get needs to be the equivalent of washing your hands after you use the restroom; it’s just something that you do (I hope anyways).
While it would be nice if people could just yell at all the wasters to solve the problem, this likely won’t be effective or plausible. Does someone want to come to my apartment every Sunday to yell at me about the food I waste? We can probably catch more flies with honey than we can with . . . stuff. Below are some ways I suggest to steer the norms around food to lower the amount of food waste. Hopefully, this will be followed by changes at peoples’ homes.
1. Changing the Dining Experience
To me, food waste that occurs at schools and restaurants happens, in part, because of a same issue: initial portion sizes are too large. Most often at schools and restaurants, diners receive only one plate of food. The reason behind this strategy is simply efficiency. If I had to serve food to hundreds of people, I too would probably like to only serve each person once.
However, the cost of that efficiency is wasted food. It should not be controversial to say that the kids who arrive for lunch at school or the people who arrive for dinner at a restaurant will not have equivalent appetites. Treating everyone as if they do, inevitably, results in some with more food than they want and others with less.
Further, even when people are given the option of portioning the food themself, people are poor judges of their own appetite. This is especially true when someone only has one plate and one opportunity to get the amount of food they want (or guess how large the portions at a restaurant are).
By shrinking the average plate size and making it normal for people to go back for seconds, less food can be wasted. Kids who want more food can go back and get more food. Patrons who are not starving when they arrive at a restaurant can buy the portion size they actually want. With the correct plate size, I think it may be striking how many people would not ask for a second plate after eating their first. Additionally, when people have to go back for seconds, they can be better judges of their appetite.
While this will require more time for people to eat and more trips for workers serving the food, it may ultimately save schools and restaurants money by making the food supply truly match the demand. Also, teaching kids at a young age that this is a normal way of eating may also translate to a change in how people consume food in their home and could save people, like me, money.
2. Changing the Buying Experience
Mass buyers of food, such as schools, restaurants, and grocery stores, face a different issue: to figure out how much food hundreds or even thousands of people will eat. The challenge is not only predicting how much food so many people will consume, but also figuring out the way people think when getting food. An assumption commonly made, that can change, is that people don’t want to buy ugly food.[6]
This assumption does not come without merit. I, for one, have been a produce snob. I have looked over the sweet potatoes for literal minutes until I found the perfect one. This way of thinking needs to change, and the mass buyers need to give people an opportunity to change by offering ugly food.
People are already looking to change this thought process. For example, Ugly Produce is Beautiful! is on a mission to make people more aware that the way food looks is not a perfect correlate of the food’s actual quality.[7] Also, it may not be as hard to change people’s perception of ugly food. Kids, for example, appear to actually like the ugly food.[8] Marketing these campaigns in grocery stores may make a significant difference and restaurants and schools should be more willing to use ugly food.
Further, grocery stores should give people the opportunity to return food they bought but didn’t eat. Like I said above, buying groceries for me also often means throwing away my food from the week before. However, if the grocery store I went to gave me the option of returning food that is still good, I could bring the food back to the store instead of throwing it away. Thus, my norm of throwing away old food when I am putting away my groceries could be replaced with me emptying my fridge before I go to the grocery store.
This may even create additional profits for grocery stores. Grocery stores could incentivize this by giving people store credit for the food brought back and then resell that food for a greater amount than the store credit. As for the logistics of making this operation work, I’ll leave that for someone else to figure out.
Conclusion
Food waste is a problem that needs solutions. It not only prevents a negative consequence, the emission of greenhouse gases, but also provides a positive upshot, less hungry people. Since there is both something to run from and run towards, this is a worthy cause for individuals to change their habits with food and organizations to change the way food is dispersed.
[1] I have no hard data to report, but you can trust me on this. I watched the bussers throw away a lot of beans and rice.
[2] Fight Climate Change by Preventing Food Waste, World Wildlife Fund, https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/fight-climate-change-by-preventing-food-waste (last visited Apr. 29, 2025).
[3] Let’s Talk About Our Impact, Misfits Market (Dec. 11, 2024), https://blog.misfitsmarket.com/impact/.
[4] Our History, Too Good To Go, https://www.toogoodtogo.com/en-us/about-us/our-history (last visited Apr. 29, 2025).
[5] Food Donation Improvement Act Signed into Law, Ctr. for Health L. & Pol’y Innovation (Jan. 6, 2023), https://chlpi.org/news-and-events/news-and-commentary/food-law-and-policy/food-donation-improvement-act-signed-into-law/.
[6] Why We Waste: Ugly Food, Expiration Dates, and More, Food Waste Feast, https://foodwastefeast.com/why-we-waste-ugly-food-expiration-dates-and-more (last visited Apr. 29, 2025).
[7] Goals, Ugly Produce is Beautiful, https://www.uglyproduceisbeautiful.com/goals.html (last visited Apr. 29, 2025).
[8] Jordan Figueiredo, Children Join the Fight Against Food Waste with Ugly Fruit and Veg, Food Tank, https://foodtank.com/news/2017/08/ugly-fruit-and-veg-campaign/ (last visited Apr. 29, 2025).