Comparing food waste interests and environmental concerns in young adults: A qualitative reasoning approach

Abstract

The large amount of food waste produced worldwide highlights the urgent need to investigate this phenomenon promptly with new methods in order to reduce it. In the present work, we consider a qualitative reasoning approach in an attempt to understand people’s interest in the food waste (FW) problem. In this direction, we run an in-person taste experiment and acquire data from 310 participants. We apply a measure based on hesitant linguistic terms sets (HLTS) to capture the degree of interest towards the environment as individuals respond to the New Environmental Paradigm scale (NEP) (Dunlap et al., 2000). We also calculate an index of hesitancy based on participants’ responses. Previously, they had to decide on whether a piece of fruit allegedly coming from the supermarket tastes better than another one allegedly coming from an alternative source such as applications designed to reduce food waste.