Wasted Food in Low-Income Households: the Role of Abundance and Affection

Economic hardship, ontological insecurity, and household food waste

“…In contrast, the self-regulatory model of scarcity suggests that psychological scarcity can activate feelings of being out of control, which can lead consumers to engage in a control-restoration process through their consumption behavior ( Cannon, Goldsmith, Roux, & Kirmani, 2019 ). This model further proposes that the control restoration mechanism can transpire by seeking novelty (e.g., obtaining new types of foods that one may not typically eat), preserving future choice (e.g., choosing a variety of flavors of a given product so that one can chose between them in the future), obtaining large amounts of otherwise scarce resources (e.g., hoarding food; Long and Khoi, 2020 , Mullainathan and Shafir, 2014 ; see Cannon et al, 2019 ), and over-preparing food to provide feelings of abundance for oneself and loved ones ( Porpino & Wansink, 2015 ). That is, such consumers are engaging in overconsumption.…”