Food Sustainability Challenged based learning: Group Blog

4th page

This is the page for the 4th week of the CBL blog.

This week is the first week of the Investigation period. During the Wednesday meeting we got the chance to take a little more time to really specify the research question. We were told that during this period we are going to start investigating our topic and research questions of choice. We got half an hour to discuss some guiding questions to help us get everything in order. We had to list our guiding questions about what we wanted to investigate. We want to look into the waste of students themselves although we realize this is difficult to do. We also want to see how much waste the university cafeterias has. We want to know how much food is prepared, however we realize this might be something which is hard to figure out. We want to achieve this by observing the habits of students in the cafeteria. We want to find out the waste of the university by reaching out to the cafeteria themselves and if they do not have an answer we will reach out to the head of sustainability of the university to find more answers. We would also like to know how much of what is being prepared/sold in the cafeteria is actually sold. We might also want to use a survey to investigate how much students throw away. The survey will be anonymous in order to stimulate students to answer truthfully. We might possibly want to reach out to the caterer appèl in order to find out more about what food is delivered to the university and more importantly how much food is delivered and why.Next we had a talk with our tutor who helped us with talking about survey criteria, it might be more interesting to figure out why students waste food. Our tutor helped us look more at possible solutions that we can think about when we have our data already. Maybe we can include questions about solutions into the survey about waste. We can find out which way of intervention would make people feel like wasting less. We should also look into what happens when waste is not able to be prevented. Next we should decide who does what. This is something which will take a little longer to do but we should be able to manage. Our tutor also told us to have an answer in mind and use the survey to cross-reference our answer and what we actually found out. We can use that in order to learn a lot of things. We might be able to use the survey to find out what more we can figure out and learn about in the rest of the module. Our next step will be starting on a survey and then finding a way to get people to respond to the survey. With this information we hope to learn more about the topic and what more we can learn.

Our data collection plan derived from the guiding questions and the table that we filled out. To find out how much food students throw away we want to make an observation in a UT cafeteria and we will make a survey. This survey will be sent out to fellow students. To answer the question of how much food is prepared and how much food is thrown away by the cafeteria, we will approach appel, the caterer. We will first send an email or make a phone call to appel and if necessary meet with someone from appel.

One problem concerning food waste is that rich countries consume on average 28 tonnes of resources per person per year, four times more than the sustainable level. In addition rich countries rely on a large net appropriation of resources from the south. Therefore the global south communities are drained of the resources necessary for development and meeting human needs. This already shows that reducing food waste might not only be better for ones wallet but also for a lot of other people.
One thing mentioned in the climate book is overconsumption. People tend to buy way more than necessary, which in our context can lead to a lot of food waste. If people buy too much food there is a big chance that they are not able to eat everything and thus have to throw away the food that went bad. In order to prevent this people would have to be more cautious with what they are buying. This could possible be making a grocery list and checking your inventory before buying food. The book mentioned that policymakers should do more with regulation, taxes and incentives to edit out harmful consumption options that are not compatible with 1.5 C lifestyles.
In addition the book mentioned that one way in which our actions matter is in the context is through providing cues and examples to others. As mentioned before we want to reduce the food waste at the UT cafeteria’s possibly by being okay with empty shelves. This would be an example of cues. We hope that by having empty shelves and providing the students with an explanation of why there are less food available they start to think about the issue themselves and hopefully start to change their own behaviour regarding food waste.