The Contrast Pressures on Consumer-Level Food Waste During a Pandemic: The Impact of Infection Salience Versus Lockdown Salience
研究区分了疫情中感染显著性和封锁显著性对消费者食物浪费的不同影响，发现感染显著性增加浪费，封锁显著性减少浪费，并提出安全健康干预措施。
Abstract Consumer food waste, with its extensive social, economic, and environmental implications, gained heightened attention during the COVID-19 pandemic, which disrupted food supply chains and exacerbated food insecurity. Amidst conflicting reports on the pandemic’s influences on consumer-level food waste, this research differentiates between the infection and lockdown facets of a pandemic. Specifically, we demonstrate that infection salience amplifies safety–health concerns, leading to increased consumer food waste, while lockdown salience raises concerns over resource scarcity, resulting in reduced consumer food waste. Considering that most pandemics or infectious diseases primarily increase infection salience without inducing lockdowns, we propose a safety–health intervention to mitigate the rise in consumer food waste driven by infection salience and the associated safety–health concerns. Through a large-scale field s tudy, a lab experiment measuring real food waste, a country-level secondary dataset, and three supplementary experiments, we provide converging supports for our theory. These studies also showcase various implementations of the safety–health intervention, such as table tents, napkins, and to-go boxes. This research reconciles divergent perspectives on the pandemic’s impact on consumer-level food waste, enriches the understanding of pandemics and associated food waste dynamics, and offers actionable strategies for businesses and policymakers to address consumer food waste during pandemics.