Why do we buy food we don’t intend to eat—and what can be done about it?
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...