Our Willingness to Waste

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Back in college, when Norbert Wilson would buy a jar of pasta sauce at the supermarket, he had every intention of using it up. But there’s only so much spaghetti a person can eat, which meant those jars occasionally ended up as half-eaten, fuzzy science experiments lurking in the back of his refrigerator.It was a small example of food waste, but one that stuck with him. Wilson, who joined the Friedman School as a professor of food policy in January, has been investigating food waste, building on his past research on food choice, domestic hunger, food banking and the international trade of food products.
When Wilson turned his attention to issues related to food waste, he theorized that consumers buy food even when they’re aware they may not finish it. It’s a concept that anyone who has purchased a container of sour cream can understand—we buy it knowing we may toss the container with a hefty portion still clinging to the sides. But what motivates people to spend good money on food they don’t intend to eat?
Wilson found a clue in 2013, when the Natural Resources Defense Council released a report showing that a substantial portion of America’s $160 billion food-waste problem could be traced to those “use by” and “sell by” dates on food containers. It turns out that many consumers, worried that food that has passed the date on its packaging is no longer worth eating, throw out plenty of perfectly good stuff. Could consumers be thinking about those labels as they buy the food?
To find out, Wilson devised an experiment that involved putting differently worded date labels on yogurt, cereal and salad greens. The labels used a variety of terms—“use by,” “best by,” “sell by” and “fresh by”—and included an expiration date. Wilson wanted to know whether certain ...

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