Food waste explained by neuroscience

Sometimes there is something paradoxical in the way we buy and order food. Domestic food waste – that is, the enormous quantity of food and drink that we throw away (27 kilograms per year for every Italian according to the Waste Watcher International Observatory on Food and Sustainability relating to 2022) – is the most unacceptable sign of this.

You live better with less

While on the one hand our awareness of the problem is increasing – this is also confirmed by recent investigations conducted by organizations that combat the phenomenon as Too Good To Go And Babaco Market – on the other hand, the change towards more conscious consumption and, yes let’s face it, a more frugal, less exaggerated lifestyle, is rather slow. We know that you live better with lessyet the temptation is always to buy and order a little more, up to absurd phenomena such as theall you can eat.

Why? What happens in our mind when, according to the saying, at the supermarket we buy in excess or at the restaurant we “order with our eyes” instead of listening to our body and its actual need to nourish itself? We tried to understand it with the help of Vincenzo Russoprofessor of Consumer psychology and coordinator of the Neuromarketing Research Center at the IULM in Milanas well as the author of many books including «Neuroscience at the Table» (Guerini).

Thinking machines that get excited

Professor Russo also confirms that, especially after the pandemic period, our sensitivity to food waste has grown according to the interviews they constantly carry out in the research center he founded in 2008. Good news, therefore, due «on the one hand to utilitarian aspects, because the waste of food is also synonymous with the waste of money, on the other to a greater respect for nature».

However, although rational awareness of these issues is growing, it is also true that most of the time our purchases and our restaurant orders follow other, more instinctive and emotional paths. Professor Russo in the IULM research center tries, through sophisticated neuroscientific techniques, to do just this, to distinguish people’s rational declarations from emotional reactions, which are often unconscious, but nevertheless very powerful: «A beautiful phrase from the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio he says that “we are not thinking machines that get emotional, but emotional machines that think”. The moral and rational dimension is often put aside when we enter the field of desires because our brain is naturally predisposed to respond to stimuli first emotionally and then rationally».

At the supermarket: 4 seconds to decide

This also happens in front of a supermarket shelf where, Russo explains, we spend time between 4 and 26 seconds: a very short time in which instinct often dominates and not a rational selection of what we need. In this period of time, the emotional reaction to the inputs we receive is even more rapid, 13 milliseconds. «At the supermarket we buy out of habit and, in 64% of cases, out of instinct, what strikes us emotionally at the same price».

Love at first sight with the product which, as also happens among people, is often guided by only one sense, the view. It is no coincidence if we look into the structure of our brain, where «50% of the cells are responsible for the visual system. We should therefore not be surprised if a label of a certain color is so powerful that it even influences taste. If we take a fruit juice and color it red with an odorless and tasteless substance, people will say that it is sweeter and fruitier than the exact same uncolored juice.”

What to do then?

We often hear about ours as one welfare society; if it were just like that, all in all it would be fine, but the problem is that more and more often this well-being translates into an illogical waste of resources. The ideal, in theory, would be to steer the ship back towards what we need, but reversals of this type are not so simple.

«Going back, moving towards a happy degrowth, for many, including the deceased colleague Giampaolo Fabris, is unthinkable because we are now too used to satisfying our desires. Consumers, Fabris argued, are increasingly more gods mature hedonists: for them the satisfaction of desires is decisive but with greater sensitivity towards critical issues, including that of food waste.”

The gentle push

What can actively contribute to change, in addition to the realities that actively fight waste (and which we talked about here), according to Russo is the gentle pushor nudging, theorized by Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize winner for economics in 2017. It’s about goads (literal English translation nudge), alternatives which, if made available, are capable of modifying some of our behaviors without making us feel forced to do so.

A practical example? There doggy bag at the restaurant: «an overall simple behavioral solution, which if put on the table induces people to take food home and not waste it», concludes Russo. Easy, almost like compiling a slightly more precise shopping list that limits the influence of emotions when we are in front of the shelf.