Citizens’ Food Habit Behavior and Food Waste Consequences during the First COVID-19 Lockdown in Spain

Abstract

During the first COVID-19 wave in Spain, confining the population at home was seen as an effective way to prevent the disease from spreading. This limited mobility affected citizens’ routines at homes because it influenced their life habits, including food management. The main objective of this paper was to understand citizens’ food waste (FW) behavior during the first COVID-19 lockdown in Spain by understanding related food practices that could have influenced FW generation. An online survey was conducted from 14 May to 11 June, 2020; 6293 valid responses were collected and analyzed, and 95% of the participants declared not wasting more food than usual. On average, they reported wasting 234 g per household per week, which equals 88 g per capita. We found significant differences in the reported FW generation between participants regarding their age, gender, household composition, and employment status due to COVID-19. In addition, food-related behaviors such as buying more food than usual due to fear or anxiety, storing more food than before the lockdown, and improvising when buying groceries seemed to affect the FW reported by the participants. The paper ends by comparing the conclusions drawn by different works conducted in other countries for a similar purpose.

Impact of COVID-19 on Food and Plastic Waste Generated by Consumers in Bangkok

“…In looking at the categories of food that have been purchased and disposed, it is clear that people have consumed more fruits, fresh vegetables, and meat than usual [25][26][27]. The total amount of food purchased, especially canned goods and frozen foods, also increased, as people may have experienced fear or anxiety about logistical systems as a result of food shortages [19,25,28]. Similar trends have been confirmed in Bangkok as well (see Section 4.3.2).…”

“…The convenience of online food delivery services and excessive food supplies might overshadow the chance for people in Bangkok to improve their skills in food planning and management. (4) Several studies [28,[31][32][33] have clarified that socio-economic and demographic factors such as age, household size and composition, income, attitudes, subjective norms, perceptions of behaviour control, and personal values might impact food management behaviours. Everitt et al [26] directly measured the quantity and composition of household FW disposed during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and examined how household demographics, socio-economic conditions and local food environment characteristics may influence household FW in the city of London, Ontario, Canada.…”

Household Food Consumption and Wastage during the COVID-19 Pandemic Outbreak: A Comparison between Peru and Brazil

“…This is actually an expected behavior in moments of crisis, where people usually make the most of the resources available [13,19,35]. Within the COVID-19 quarantine context, most subjects adopted the money-saving strategies of storing and eating leftovers, thus managing the amount of food wasted by either reusing leftovers or freezing uneaten food, as discussed in previous research studies [7,12,19,31,35,60]. Therefore, activities aimed at preventing food wastage were similar in both countries.…”

“…As sociodemographic characteristics also influence the amount of food wasted [27,35,63,71], several studies have found significant relationships between household waste and the sociodemographic characteristics of members of the household, such as age [15,31,50,53,66,69,71], family income, and number of household members [15,23,27,50,53,59], as well as gender [50], educational level [42,50,58,69], and occupation [35] of the purchasing decision-makers. In this sense, household size influences food wastage because households with few members waste less food and people living alone waste even less [71].…”

“…Previous studies assert that as household incomes decrease from the contraction of economic activities and the reduction of mobility associated with the context of crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, people start becoming more careful with their budgets and minimizing food wastage [7,23,25,28,29,43,58,65,68]. Here, we would have to dig deeply into aspects such as awareness of the economic value of food waste [26,53,62,69], the environmental and social impacts caused by food wastage [53,58,69], and even ethical aspects [36,68] because food-related behaviors can be modified owing to uncertainty and anxiety caused by the pandemic [7,31,43,73]. However, better grocery shopping planning and organization during the COVID-19 lockdown also effectively prevented panic buying and cooking in excess [7].…”