The Fridges Where Food Goes to Die: "There's the purchasing of food, the management of food within the home, and the disposal, and these household routines ultimately increase or decrease waste.".

• Author: Crane, Misti
• Position: Mind & Body

AMERICANS throw out a lot more food than they expect they will, an example of food waste that likely is driven in part by ambiguous date labels on packages, a study by researchers at Ohio State University and Louisiana State University has found.

"People eat a lot less of their refrigerated food than they expect to, and they're likely throwing out perfectly good food because they misunderstand labels," says Brian Roe, the study's senior author and OSU professor of agricultural, environmental, and development economics.

This study offers a data-driven glimpse into the refrigerators of U.S. homes, and provides an important framework for efforts to decrease food waste, Roe indicates. It was published in the journal Resources, Conservation & Recycling.

Survey participants expected to eat 97% of the meat in their refrigerators but really finished only about half. They thought they would eat 94% of their vegetables, but consumed 44%. They projected they would eat about 71% of the fruit and 84% of the dairy, but finished off 40% and 42%, respectively.

Top drivers of discarding food included concerns about food safety--odor, appearance, and dates on labels. "No one knows what 'use by' and 'best by' labels mean and people think they are a safety indicator when they are generally a quality indicator," points out Roe, adding that there is a proposal currently before Congress to prescribe date labeling rules in an effort to provide some clarity.

Under the proposal, "Best if used by" would, as Roe puts it, translate to "Follow your nose," and "Use by" would translate to 'Toss it."

Other findings from the study include:

* People who clean out their refrigerators more often waste more food.

* Those who check nutrition labels frequently waste less food. Roe speculates that those consumers may be more engaged in food and therefore less likely to waste what they buy.

* Younger households are less likely to use up the items in their refrigerators while homes to those 65 and older are most likely to avoid waste.

Household food waste occurs at the end of the line of a series of behaviors, suggests Megan Davenport, who led the study as a graduate student at Ohio State. "There's the purchasing of food, the management of food within the home, and the disposal, and these household routines ultimately increase or decrease waste. We wanted to better understand those relationships, and how individual products--including their labels--affect the amount of food waste in...