Would you share food with strangers?

We’re happy to donate food but not so keen on accepting it. That’s the finding of a QUT study investigating ways to reduce domestic food waste.

Dr Geremy Farr-Wharton, from the Urban Informatics Research Lab in the QUT School of Design, has looked at the use of technology to promote food sharing and found more people will share their unwanted food, compared to those who will accept the same offer.

“Household garbage is made up of 20–40% of domestic food, which costs Australians $6 billion annually,” Dr Farr-Wharton said.

“Domestic food waste also contributes to climate change and greenhouse gas emissions with discarded food accounting for about 20% of landfill capacity, which goes on to decompose and release harmful methane gas.”

Dr Farr-Wharton said food sharing was one solution to reducing food waste but warned that there were attitudinal barriers to overcome. While study participants found it acceptable to share food with family and close friends, there was a reluctance to share with strangers, with whom there was no feeling of trust and comfort.

For instance, people might feel awkward going to someone else’s house to retrieve a shared food item, and others said they would only take items that were well packaged or where they trusted the person sharing.

To better understand these views, Dr Farr-Wharton developed a food sharing acceptability scale.

“Optimal trust and comfort occurs between family and close friends and is likely to work best within a known community of sharers,” he said.

“Housemates are more likely to share with housemates but less likely to share with neighbours. Also, if a trusted person promotes food sharing among an unknown community, a person is more likely to share food.”

Dr Farr-Wharton said the next step would be to further research how technology could be used to promote food sharing within the confines of what people find acceptable.

“Changing practices around food and its waste can be a challenging mindset to shift, but technology is one possible way to facilitate reducing the amount of food we throw out,” he said.