Food waste is something that almost everyone in the United States has faced in one way or another. It could be a mother scolding her children for not finishing their meal as there are “starving children’ or a forgetful university student who has to throw out yet another fridgeful of leftovers and ingredients that have yet again been forgotten. Food waste is considered a subset of the term food loss; food loss refers to the “edible amount of food available for human consumption but is not consumed,” while food waste is defined as “when an edible item goes unconsumed” (Price, 2020, 28). In the U.S., about one pound of food is thrown out daily (Igini, 2022), which can add up very quickly. Studying food waste is still relatively new, and most research has focused on the individual consumer instead of more giant corporations (Boys and Rickard, 2019). This proposal will discuss the importance of studying food waste as a consumer and corporations in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to better understand how the population’s quality of life and natural environment are affected. This paper will refer to food waste only, as the term better encompasses the goals of this research.

The objective of this research is to study corporate and consumer level food waste and reflect upon its impacts on the environment and quality of life for residents in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It is important to study this issue in the context of the climate crisit because it is such a growing issue globally, therefore it is important to study how this issue is affecting residents locally within the U.S. and what part food waste plays. It is yet to be understood how corporations and consumers feel about food waste and how significantly quality of life is impacted. This is why it is so important to continue research into the topic of food waste.

This paper will utilize the Norm-Activation model to gauge the issue of food waste. Norm-Activation Model takes issues such as food waste which is defined as “when an edible item goes unconsumed” (Price, 2020, 28), and uses several factors such as awareness of consequence or the awareness of the potential consequences of one’s actions, ascription of responsibility or someone’s assumptions towards other’s who are more responsible, personal norms or one’s personal values and beliefs, and psychological factors or elements of one’s personality that limit or enhance thinking to determine one’s self-efficacy or degree to which individuals believe they are capable of accomplishing something along with their behavior intentions also known as the motivational factors that influence a given behavior surrounding the issue (Wang, Li, Li, and Chen). 

This is an appropriate framework to look at this topic because it can help discern how consumers and corporations feel about the issue of food waste as well as figure out how motivated the public is to learn about the issue along with what to do about it. This framework will measure the amount of food wasted in Grand Rapids, Michigan annually. It will also measure the residents and what they believe will happen if food is wasted, how responsible they believe themselves to be or if they believe that responsibility is on another entity, what their beliefs surrounding waste, preservation of the environment, and consumerism are, how capable they believe themselves to be at limiting food waste, how likely they are to commit to limiting food waste, as well as testing for different psychological factors that could influence perceptions and abilities.