Household Food Waste from an International Perspective

ABSTRACT

[...]households are the stage of the food supply chain where the greater part of food waste is generated in absolute terms. [...]the scientific debate is strongly lead by the US, UK, and Italy, at least in numerical terms. Looking at the sponsors, it is clear that the top 15 contributors are basically supported by public funding, especially the EU, China, US, and Canada, followed by UK and Norway (Figure 4). [...]the debate about household food waste seems to be strictly related to the availability of a country’s financial resources for research funding. COVID-19 has been a hindering factor for the application of different methods, as contacts with people have been forbidden during the recurrent 2020–2021 lockdowns (and lockdowns are still occurring at the time of writing this editorial), thus limiting the opportunities to enquire into the issue with other methods (diary, waste audits, ethnographic approaches). [...]both from a geographical and methodological point of view, we did not collect the variety of studies we were aiming to, especially contributions from developing economies (see Table 1).