Exploring Egyptian Youth’s Awareness towards Food Waste

Abstract

Decreasing food waste (FW) came to be an urgent need to achieve sustainable food systems transformation. Measuring the youth's awareness towards FW represents an important action to design an effective strategy intervention that aims reduction the percentage of FW. The purpose of this paper is to explore the knowledge of youth regarding FW as well as identify factors influencing this knowledge. To achieve the aim of this study, the primary data have been collected from 430 students at Fayoum University, Egypt. The binary logistic regression (BLR) model was employed to identify factors influencing FW knowledge among youth. Results showed that age, residence place, and knowledge of social, economic and environmental impacts of food waste are significantly influencing knowledge about FW. The current results concluded and highlighted the importance of designing an educational curriculum at universities including FW and sustainable consumption concepts. So, youth's skills-building interventions through campaigns should be regularly held to promote changing norms and attitudes toward less FW and responsible consumption behaviour to accelerate the sustainable agri-food systems transformation in developing countries.